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Prelims /007 7/22/03 11:40 am Page i
Against
Global Apartheid
South Africa meets
the World Bank, IMF and International Finance
Patrick Bond
Zed Books Ltd

London and New York
UCT
PRESS
University of Cape Town Press

Prelims /007 7/22/03 11:40 am Page ii
Against Global Apartheid: 2nd edition

South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance was first published
by UCT Press (Pty) Ltd, PO Box 24309, Lansdowne 7779, South Africa and outside
South Africa by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK and 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010,USA in 2003.
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. In terms of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978,
no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system) without permission
in writing from the publisher.
© UCT Press, 2001, 2003
Second edition 2003
ISBN 1 919 71382 4 UCT Press, limp

ISBN 1 842 77393 3 ZED Books, limp
ISBN 1 842 77392 5 ZED Books, Hb
Cataloging - in - Publication Data is Available from the British Library
US CIP has been applied for from the Library of Congress
Copy editing by Alex Potter of FPP Productions

Proofreading and indexing by Jan Schaafsma
Cover design by The Pumphaus Design Studio cc
Typesetting by RHT desktop publishing cc, Durbanville
Printed and bound in South Africa by Formeset Printers
Acknowledgements
Cover photograph of Jubilee protest courtesy of Business Day.
All other ptotographs courtesy of Ben Cashdan
Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue New York, NY 10010
www.zedbooks.demon.co.uk
Prelims /007 7/22/03 11:40 am Page iii
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvi
Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
Part one: Powers and vulnerabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter one: Global crisis, African oppression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Global crisis, and crisis displacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. The African crisis continues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Chapter two: Southern African socio-economic conflict . . . . . . . . . . 31

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2. Origins of the regional proletariat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3. Structural socio-economic and environmental decline . . . . . . . . 39
4. Workers, organisations and class politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
5. Capital accumulation and regional visions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Chapter three: Bretton Woods bankruptcies in Southern Africa . . . . 54

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2. From Bretton Woods to the debt crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3. Shaping Southern African development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4. From projects to policy in Southern Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Chapter four: Foreign aid, development and underdevelopment . . . . 80

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
2. Dependency and leverage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3. Currency risk on loans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
4. Civil society expectations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5. Attributing blame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Prelims /007 7/22/03 11:40 am Page iv
iv A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
Part two: Elite contestation of global governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Chapter five: The global balance of forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2. The pro-status-quo forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3. Forces for change (?) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
4. Alliances falter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Chapter six: Ideology and global governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
2. Explaining globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
3. Globalisation’s techno-economic fix? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4. Ideology and self-interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Chapter seven: Pretoria’s global governance strategy . . . . . . . . . . . 134

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
2. ‘Globalisation made me do it’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
3. Mbeki v. ‘the globalisation of apartheid’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
4. Towards – or against – ‘global solidarity’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Part three: Economic power and the case of HIV/AIDS treatment . 153
Chapter eight: Pharmaceutical corporations and US imperialism . . 154
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
2. US government pressure points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
3. Drug companies pressure the US government . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
4. Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Chapter nine: Civil society conquest, state failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
2. Pharmaceutical pricing and street politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
3. A political economy of South African AIDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Part four: Globalisation? – or internationalism plus the nation state? 191

Chapter ten: The ‘Fix-it-or-nix-it’ debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
2. The World Bank under siege . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
3. Reformers run into trouble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
4. Strategic divergences on the left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
5. After the IMF/World Bank have gone:
Local/national/regional development finance? . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Prelims /007 7/22/03 11:40 am Page v
C ONTENTS v
Chapter eleven: The Third World in the movement for global justice 215
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
2. The world against Washington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
3. Lessons of Zapatismo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
4. Does Africa need Washington? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
5. South-South-North alliances against
global finance/commerce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Chapter twelve: The case for locking capital down . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
2. Comparative capital controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
3. A brief history of South Africa’s domestic finance
and uneven development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
4. Exchange control options for South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
5. Conclusion: From global apartheid
to democratised investment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page vi
Preface
[Southern African countries] were pressured into implementing [IMF and

World Bank] programmes with adverse effects on employment and
standards of living … The RDP must use foreign debt financing only for
those elements of the programme that can potentially increase our capacity
for earning foreign exchange. Relationships with international financial
institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund must
be conducted in such a way as to protect the integrity of domestic policy
formulation and promote the interests of the South African population and
the economy. Above all, we must pursue policies that enhance national self-
sufficiency and enable us to reduce dependence on international financial
institutions. (African National Congress Reconstruction and Development
Programme, 1994)1
Introduction: International financial pressure points

The words above were amongst many in the first African National Congress
(ANC) campaign platform, the RDP (Reconstruction and Development
Programme), that conveyed progressive ambitions – infused with informed
scepticism about global financial power – for South Africa’s future. How
quickly this particular promise was broken!2
I recall distinctly entering into fierce debates in January–February 1994
with an ANC official based at party headquarters in Luthuli House, in the
seedy Joubert Park section of central Johannesburg. The stony fellow
responsible for banking/finance policy,3 under the supervision of Trevor
Manuel and Tito Mboweni, was terribly upset with our tortuous formu-
lation on foreign debt, especially the idea of ‘self-sufficiency’, which was
arrived at after many attempts by the RDP drafting team. Sensing trouble,
leaders of the SA National Civic Organisation (SANCO), which I served as
RDP editor, went back to their base for mandates. The word came back: the
provision hostile to international finance could not be dropped. RDP repre-
sentatives of the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Alec Erwin) and SA
Communist Party (Jeremy Cronin) overrode the neo-liberal ANC official.
The ANC’s formal political representative (Max Sisulu) concurred.
But good RDP rhetoric could not disguise bad practice by those like
Manuel and even Erwin, when they became intent upon international
Preface /007 7/24/03 2:51 pm Page vii
P REFACE vii
financial integration. (And in any case, the discursive victory was merely a
symbolic – not decisive – incident.) Beginning in mid-1990, ‘reconnaissance
missions’ from the Washington-based financial institutions were already
undermining the integrity of domestic policy formulation, and ambitiously
promoting the interests of international financial and corporate capital.
This book tells that broader story, tracing it forward into the post-apart-
heid era. Indeed, by early 2001, George Soros confirmed during an inter-
view with film-maker Ben Cashdan at the Davos World Economic Forum
that, ‘Today South Africa is very much in the hands of international
capital.’4
But from illegitimate domination, resistance inevitably emerges. A few
minutes prior to Soros’ confession, on an international satellite transmission
that linked Davos to Porto Alegre’s World Social Forum, Soweto political
activist Trevor Ngwane had, face to face, accused the financier of indirectly
putting a massive squeeze on Pretoria’s budget. In turn, fiscal austerity was
the most proximate national cause of water cut-offs, a failure to install pipes
to households without access, and a resulting cholera outbreak that, within
ten months, infected more than 100 000 people, killing more than 200.
I come from South Africa. We still had a hope that liberation would bring
houses, jobs and good education for our people. But since our government
got closer to the World Bank and people like George Soros, we have lost a
million jobs. As I am talking we had an outbreak of cholera because the
government was forced by the likes of Soros to introduce privatisation of
basic services like water and electricity.
Ngwane ‘actually has a point, because South Africa has to meet the
requirements of international capital’, acknowledged Soros.
I think South Africa is following pretty sound macroeconomic policies, but
is not able to generate sufficient growth to satisfy the legitimate aspirations
of the people. And there is something wrong with this … Because actually,
the global market, as it functions, is really an uneven playing field. The
centre is much better situated than the periphery countries. And it is better
situated not just because it is wealthy, but also because it controls the system.
Ngwane, Soros and the politicians who sit uncomfortably in between will
make further appearances in this book, as I document global uneven devel-
opment, inequality, financial crisis and some of their implications for
ordinary South Africans.
Soros, to his credit, has always spoken frankly of the threat that inter-
national capitalism poses to society. On occasion, Thabo Mbeki and his
colleagues have said much the same. But repeatedly, the outcome has
always appeared to any attentive observer as a case of ‘talking left, acting
right’.
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page viii
viii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
The larger point of all this will become clearer in Parts 1–3 of this book.
Put briefly, it is, simply, that the democratic transition in South Africa to an
important degree hinged not only on pressures for political liberation. Just
as crucial was acknowledgment by ANC deal-makers that the trade-off for
the big business community’s belated rejection of apartheid was economic
liberalisation – i.e. release of local capital from apartheid’s laager, whether
through dramatically lower corporate taxes (down from 48% in 1994 to
30% by 1999), lower tariffs on imports, or the lifting of controls that had
prevented capital flight.
Crudely put, big business basically said, ‘You chaps can have the state, but
let us get our money out of here!’ Not only did the financial looting of South
Africa follow apace, but also the country’s economic, social, cultural and
policy environment was – and continues to be – enormously influenced by
global economic processes and institutions.
Yet what is termed ‘globalisation’ brazenly contradicts society’s strong
motivation for more equitable development to redress the massive residual
disparities of apartheid. The detrimental influence of international
economic integration is most strongly felt through new financial, trade and
investment vulnerabilities, but also in social policy that follows inter-
national norms, and to a certain extent in political-cultural subordination to
the global markets. As President Mbeki himself put it in mid-2000, ‘The
globalization of the economy resulting among other things in rapid move-
ments of huge volumes of capital across the globe, objectively also has the
effect of limiting the possibility of states to take unilateral decisions.’5
The narrowing of national sovereignty is most evident when a country
falls foul of the likes of George Soros. So let us take a quick look at what
exactly happens.
In the hands of international capital

South Africans are repeatedly told that since 1994, ‘sound macroeconomic
policies’, including rapid financial and trade liberalisation, ensured ‘stabil-
ity’ and the highest international regard. It is as if by repeating the mantra
often enough, the harsh underlying reality can be disregarded.
Yet many of us who served the ANC and South African government will
never forget at least two moments during Nelson Mandela’s 1994–9
presidency, moments of terrible panic that reflected both unique local frail-
ties and – thanks to the vagaries of international finance – the more general
brittleness of ‘emerging market’ economies.
In the first example, in February 1996, a decision to drop capital controls
eleven months earlier suddenly proved disastrous. The two main macro-
economic managers, Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals and finance minister
Chris Liebenberg, abolished the ‘financial rand’ exchange-control mecha-
nism in March 1995. The finrand, a market-related dual exchange rate, had
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page ix
P REFACE ix
served as South Africa’s main barrier to damaging global financial flows for
nearly a decade. In August 1985, foreign banks fled immediately after
PW Botha’s finger-wagging ‘Rubicon’ speech, so the finrand substantially
slowed subsequent capital flight by serving as a tax on outflows.6 As a result
of its 1995 demise, sufficient ‘hot money’ flowed into South African shares
that year to fund half the trades on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.7
But in early 1996, the hot money flooded back out, leading to a currency
crash of more than a quarter of the rand’s value over several months, set off
by a ‘sell’ report emanating from Zurich bankers that was induced by a false
rumour that Mandela was ill. The Reserve Bank quickly lost R5 billion of its
hard-currency reserves, representing a drop in import coverage from two
months’ worth to less than one month’s by mid-1996. The value of the rand
slid from R3.60 to the US$ in January 1996 to R4.40/$ in March, to R4.70/$
in December. In order to stem the outflow and stabilise the rand, interest
rates were hiked dramatically over a few weeks. In ‘real’ (after-inflation)
terms, the prime interest rate paid by leading firms rose from 12% to nearly
15% in May 1996, a level only once surpassed in modern South African
history (in mid-1998).
The adoption of the homegrown structural adjustment programme
Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) followed soon after, as a
direct response to international investor demands. ‘Just call me a
Thatcherite’, whimpered Mbeki at the Gear press conference on 14 June,
begging the markets to stabilise. But self-humiliation was not enough, as the
currency slide continued for several more months.
No matter the painful and surprising experience of 1996, South Africa’s
macroeconomic managers failed to learn from their experience. The second
post-apartheid rand crash occurred over a few weeks beginning in April
1998. Global investors fled the ‘emerging markets’ following the East Asian
and Russian collapses, and South Africa again faced financial crisis. Most
spectacularly, Stals wasted more than R30 billion in hard currency reserves
one weekend in June when he unsuccessfully tried to defend the rand from
attack by local and foreign sellers.
The rand’s fall continued, from R5.10/$ in May to R6.70/$ at its low
point in July, before it stabilised at R6.20/$ in subsequent months. More so
than in 1996, this badly affected the JSE, whose all-share index dropped
nearly 40% from its April 1998 peak of 8 200, to a low of less than 5 000 in
August. In addition, net bond purchases switched from an inflow of nearly
R10 billion in the first quarter of 1998 to an outflow of nearly R16 billion
in the third quarter. This was the key factor in the drop in Reserve Bank
foreign reserves from an import cover of more than three months to just
over two months from April to September 1998. To attract funds back to
South Africa, Stals raised the Reserve Bank’s main lending rate from 14.8%
in April to 21.8% in August.
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page x
x A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
To break – or to shine – the chains of global apartheid?

These incidents were merely the two most important surface manifestations
of South Africa’s decline. There were many other economically suicidal
exposures to global processes in the years immediately following democ-
racy in 1994, leaving South Africa with an international competitiveness
ranking of 43rd out of 49 major countries in the main Swiss business
school’s 2001 competitiveness survey.8 And at a deeper level, as Chapter
one will show, further damage was wrought by the general international
economic slowdown that had begun around three decades earlier, amplified
at the turn of the century by a massive glut in unutilised production
capacity worse than at any other time since the 1930s.9
On the one hand, in this context, growing foreign trade amplified South
Africa’s own long-standing economic crisis – particularly deindustrialisa-
tion and job loss. On the other hand, a trade surplus with Africa reached an
extreme level, causing untenable balance of payments problems and de-
industrialisation in the region. The neo-liberal regional policy generated
rising geopolitical tensions and lured economic refugees from neighbouring
lands, in turn contributing to world-class xenophobia amongst South
African workers.
There was, moreover, a net outflow of international direct investment
from South Africa during the first five years after apartheid, while the
uneven dribs and drabs of incoming foreign investment were largely of the
merger/acquisition variety rather than long-term investments projects.
Most of the country’s biggest companies – Anglo American, Old Mutual,
Gencor/Billiton, South African Breweries, Didata – took the gap, relisting
to conduct their primary stock-market trading in London, or in the case of
De Beers, delisting entirely in 2001. Simultaneously, economic advice from
international financiers boiled down to persistent demands for macro-
economic policies conducive to South Africa’s increased global vulnera-
bility.
A regular declaration of ‘impotence’ was the response to these pressures
from South Africa’s political leaders, especially Mandela, Mbeki, Manuel,
trade minister Alec Erwin and approximately a dozen others with key ideo-
logical and functionary responsibilities. (Manuel actually used the word, in
an interview, when discussing state job creation capacity.)10 Parts three and
four of this book consider the debate over whether Pretoria had or has
room for manoeuvre, and whether it was necessary to take the strategic turn
towards neo-liberalism chosen by key state officials when confronted by the
ever-tightening chains of the global economy.
I borrow here the metaphor that then Archbishop Desmond Tutu taught
my fellow anti-apartheid activists at Johns Hopkins University in early
1986, when he encouraged us to increase the pressure for ‘divestment’ by
universities (and other aspiring socially responsible shareholders) on
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page xi
P REFACE xi
companies with active South African operations. At the same time, a few
miles up the I-95 highway in Philadelphia, an inner-city preacher, Rev. Leon
Sullivan, was conducting an entirely different crusade: to help multinational
corporations continue operating within South Africa, but under a half-
hearted code of conduct committing them to conduct their own operations
in a somewhat less explicitly racist manner. Tutu referred to Sullivan’s
gambit as ‘shining the chains of apartheid’, and confirmed that the demo-
cratic forces would fight on until apartheid’s chains were completely
broken.
Thabo Mbeki unabashedly terms the international political-economic
system ‘global apartheid’. The next logical question is: are Mbeki, Manuel,
Erwin and their colleagues aiming to ‘break’ the chains of 21st-century
global apartheid, or merely to provide a glossy, New South Africa ‘shine’?
Nixing not fixing global apartheid: A South African

case study
According to Pretoria’s critics, instead of fundamentally challenging global
apartheid, the South African government has been lubricating the financial,
trade and investment processes that are amongst the most damaging.
Evidence is found not only in the enthusiastic local application of the
Washington Consensus through the Gear strategy. In addition, key South
African officials are lending legitimacy to the World Bank, International
Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO) and like-minded
institutions. At home, the same officials persist in denying the need to roll
back free-market processes, even in areas such as patent protection on
HIV/AIDS drugs (discussed below in Part three) and capital controls (Part
four), where there is an overwhelmingly case for breaking global apartheid’s
chains.
However, even if Parts one and two of Against Global Apartheid offer a
profoundly pessimistic account of South African and international macro-
economic management, this by no means implies that pandering to inter-
national elites is a permanent affliction. On the contrary, there is evidence
to suggest that the free-market Washington Consensus ideology began to
ebb during the late 1990s, and that popular resistance is already affecting
not just state policies, but also the international balance of forces.
Can the damage that has been done be reversed?
I think it can, and therefore most of the second half of the book is
devoted to exploring ways in which popular pressure exerted from below
can end, not perpetuate, global apartheid. By way of concluding this
preface, I want to reflect, for a moment, on a single case of concrete
activism that is indicative of broader potentials.
The university at which I teach, the University of the Witwatersrand
(‘Wits’) in central Johannesburg, is presently the site of a ‘World Bank
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page xii
xii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
Bonds Boycott’ campaign by students, staff and faculty. The short-run

demand is simple: that university finance officials commit themselves never
to buy bonds issued by the World Bank. (The World Bank gets 80% of its
funding from investors like Wits.)
From 1995, Wits officials could move 15% of the university’s R1 billion
endowment offshore. Some of that money – the amount varies from day to
day, depending on investment trends – is channeled into bonds issued by
the World Bank and sold to Wits via international fund managers. The same
is true of most major South African institutions, and indeed virtually all
funds that have access to international capital markets buy at least a small
share of internationally rated, top-grade World Bank securities.
As Part four argues, the strategy of closing – ‘nixing’ – the World Bank
and IMF is not a faulty one. And to that end, the World Bank Bonds
Boycott is an inspired tactic, since it allows activists and ordinary people to
get involved in fighting global apartheid every day in their own communities
(not just at major demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, Washington, Quebec
City and so on).
As I will show in more detail in Chapter three, there are many reasons
specific to South and Southern Africa why getting the World Bank to close
up shop would be beneficial to local peoples. Borrowing the Wits activists’
rhetoric, I lay out below some of the reasons for bond-boycotting the World
Bank. Specific crimes committed by the World Bank and IMF during South
Africa’s apartheid era include:
the World Bank’s US$100 million in loans to Eskom from 1951 to 1967
that gave only white people electric power, but for which all South
Africans paid the bill;
the World Bank’s point-blank refusal to heed a United Nations General
Assembly instruction in 1966 not to lend to apartheid South Africa;
IMF apartheid-supporting loans of more than $2 billion between the
Soweto uprising in 1976 and 1983, when the US Congress finally pro-
hibited lending to Pretoria;
a World Bank loan to build dams in Lesotho that was widely acknowl-
edged to ‘bust’ sanctions against apartheid South Africa in 1986, via a
London trust; and
IMF advice to Pretoria in 1991 to impose the regressive value-added tax
(VAT), in opposition to which 3.5 million people went on a two-day
stayaway.
Subsequently, neo-apartheid lending and policy advice by the Bretton

Woods twins include:
an $850 million IMF loan to South Africa in December 1993 that carried
conditions of wage restraint and cuts in the budget deficit, which in turn
hampered the transition to democracy;
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page xiii
P REFACE xiii
World Bank promotion of ‘market-oriented’ land reform in 1993–94,

which established such onerous conditions (similar to the failed
Zimbabwe policy) that instead of 30% land redistribution as mandated
in the RDP, less than 1% of good land was redistributed;
the World Bank’s endorsement of bank-centred housing policy in August
1994, with recommendations for smaller housing subsidies;
the World Bank’s design of South African infrastructure policy in
November 1994, which provided the rural and urban poor with only pit
latrines, no electricity connections, inadequate roads and communal
taps instead of house or yard taps;
the World Bank’s insistence that corrupt Lesotho Highlands Development
Authority boss Masupha Sole stay in his job in December 1994 (six years
after he began taking bribes from international construction compa-
nies), in a threatening letter to the Lesotho government;
the World Bank’s promotion of water cut-offs for those unable to afford
payments, its opposition to a free ‘lifeline’ water supply and its recom-
mendations against irrigation subsidies for black South Africans in
October 1995, within a government water-pricing policy in which the
World Bank claimed (in its 1999 Country Assistance Review) it played an
‘instrumental’ role;
the World Bank’s conservative role in the Lund Commission in 1996,
which recommended a 44% cut in the monthly grant to impoverished,
dependent children, from R135 per month to R75;
the World Bank’s participation in the failed Growth, Employment and
Redistribution (Gear) policy in June 1996, through contributing two staff
economists and its economic model;
the World Bank and IMF’s consistent message to South African workers
that their wages are too high, and that unemployment can only be cured
through ‘labour flexibility’;
the World Bank’s role in Egoli 2002, including research support and
encouragement of municipal privatisation;
the World Bank’s repeated commitments to invest, through its subsidiary
the International Finance Corporation, in privatised infrastructure,
housing securities for high-income families, for-profit ‘managed health-
care’ schemes, and the now-bankrupt, US-owned Dominos Pizza franchise;
the consistent failure of World Bank and IMF ‘structural adjustment
programmes’ in Southern Africa since the 1980s; and
the stubborn refusal by the World Bank and IMF to cancel debt owed by
our impoverished neighbours since the mid-1990s, except in tiny amounts
and with brutal conditionality provisions.
There are, to be sure, people of good conscience who dispute ‘nix-it’ strate-
gies and tactics. Some have made valiant efforts since the early 1980s to ‘fix’
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page xiv
xiv A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
the IMF, World Bank, international financial markets and other manifesta-
tions of global apartheid. In fields like environmental regulation, gender
sensitivity, community participation, institutional transparency, corporate
accountability, and even the highlighting of poverty, the fixers can claim a
few victories.11
But simultaneously, broader social, environmental and economic con-
ditions worsened dramatically. Reformers can claim less and less legitimacy
for their efforts, which often appear as merely shifting deck-chairs on a
Titanic-like global economy. So it is to a different group we will have to
turn, especially in Chapters ten to twelve, for a vision of a better future, to
what I term ‘global justice movements’. In this group can be found organi-
sations and people who have little or no faith in the initiatives advanced by
the small bloc of Third World nationalists and ‘post-Washington
Consensus’ reformers, and who see the need for deeper surgery.
Over the past fifteen years, I have been extremely privileged to have had
contact with inspiring global justice advocates, activists and intellectuals.
Whatever I may have written in the pages below that makes some sense is
due almost entirely to their input.
Notes
1 African National Congress (1994), The Reconstruction and Development Programme,
Johannesburg, Umanyano Publications, sections 1.4.17 and 6.5.16.
2 For a recounting of other promises and how they fared, see Bond, P. and Khosa, M.
(1999), An RDP Policy Audit, Pretoria, Human Sciences Research Council; and
Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa,
London, Pluto and Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, Chapter 3:
‘Rumours, Dreams and Promises’.
3 Tellingly, a few weeks after the mid-1994 transition, after failing to get the top
Reserve Bank financial regulatory position he sought, Neil Morrison took a job with
a Johannesburg merchant bank to promote privatisation.
4 This and subsequent quotes come from Cashdan, B. (2001), Globalisation: Whose
Side are We On?, film, Johannesburg, recorded in January in Davos.
5 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Keynote Address to the ANC National General Council’, Port
Elizabeth, 12 July.
6 The premium paid by exporters of financial capital ranged from 10% to 50%,
depending on exchange rates and political circumstances. See Chapter twelve for
more on the finrand.
7 The finrand was dropped, inexplicably, in the immediate wake of a run on the
currencies of Mexico and other Latin American countries by investment specu-
lators. Suddenly, as a result, purchases of South African bonds by non-residents
doubled from the average annual levels of the past decade. The inflow also led to a
rise in the monthly average share turnover from R5 billion to R10 billion within
a year, and the stock-market all-share index rose from 5 000 in early 1995 to 7 000 a
year later (using 1960 as the 100 index).
8 Business Day, 25 April 2001.
9 The Economist, 22 February 1999.
10 Sunday Independent, 9 January 2000.
Preface /007 7/22/03 11:39 am Page xv
P REFACE xv
11 Personally, I was party to several such campaigns to reform the World Bank,
beginning in 1985 when I joined the national executive of the US Debt Crisis
Network. Finally, in 1998, I gave up on this approach. The straw that broke the
camel’s back was the World Bank Inspection Panel’s rejection of a formal, well-
documented request to investigate the Lesotho Highlands Water Project scheme, as
Chapter three describes, leaving Johannesburg township activists stunned at the
World Bank’s lack of accountability. The last gasp for reform was probably the effort
by World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz to introduce a ‘Post-Washington
Consensus’ economic paradigm – but Stiglitz was fired in late 1999.
Acknowledge 7/22/03 6:26 pm Page xvi
Acknowledgements
First, refer to endnote 2 of Chapter three for a list of extraordinary Southern

Africans active in various campaigns against global apartheid at the turn of
the 21st century. I honour these women and men for giving society so much
raw material of praxis, upon which this book so often draws.
Let me recognise some other local and international influences. I regu-
larly assert that the horrors of worsening uneven development in my
adopted hometown – perhaps the world’s most unsustainable city, though
incongruously chosen to host the United Nations World Summit on
Sustainable Development (‘Rio+10’) in September 2002 – are outweighed
by Johannesburg’s enormously rich political, social and cultural ambience.
This is most explicit when progressive South Africans think about the
lessons they have to share with the rest of the region and world.
These experiences are quite frequent. The Johannesburg/Pretoria nexus
has been a great place from which to watch the world go by this last decade.
In large part this is because a wide variety of internationalists regularly stop
by and give seminars, hosted by Jubilee South Africa, the Campaign
Against Neoliberalism in South Africa, my university and other organisa-
tions. In addition, I personally have been a very grateful beneficiary of a
‘people’s globalisation’ that, in the form of frequent-flying conference-
hopping, wreaks havoc on the environment (through jet-engine emissions),
but that has allowed me to participate at some of the most exciting sites of
conflict with global-apartheid institutions, and to also engage in careful
reflection in more tranquil settings.1 Affable hosts invariably motivated me
to work my arguments into better shape.2
In the process, this book has benefitted enormously from a welcome
stream of e-mails and from face-to-face discussions with dozens of other
colleagues over these past three years,3 not to mention advice from some
tolerant housemates: Ben Cashdan, Darlene Miller and Greg Ruiters. This
was a fine mix.
While Darlene and Greg kept me updated on international intellectual
fads and scolded me, correctly but always with a smile, about the dangers
of ‘substitutionism’, Ben made contributions that far transcend the photo-
graphs I have lifted from him. His persistent, humorous questioning of the
world’s most powerful men warrants the cult status that his documentaries
are acquiring.
Acknowledge 7/22/03 6:26 pm Page xvii
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS xvii
On the activist front, Dennis Brutus, George Dor, Trevor Ngwane and
John Saul remain my heroes and closest comrades, for their tireless commit-
ment to popular education and mobilisation. Archbishop Njongonkulu
Ndungane and Fatima Meer have served as politico-moral compasses, with
their mature but no less urgent intent to abolish global apartheid.
Back at the office, the director of the Wits Graduate School of Public
and Development Management, Guy Mhone, established the ideal condi-
tions for a footloose academic/activist, and all my colleagues have been
broad-minded about their errant hallmate. My co-directors of the
Municipal Services Project, David McDonald and Greg Ruiters, kept me
thinking and researching locally. I have been lucky to labour within a milieu
of enquiry at Wits where masters and doctoral students have taught me a
great deal.4 And I serve as a volunteer associate of two other institutions
which are remarkably effective on shoestring budgets: the Alternative
Information and Development Centre (Cape Town/Johannesburg) and
Center for Economic Justice (Washington).
An old Argus Company desk at which I wrote most of the words that
follow was a gift from my former neighbour Peter Wellman, who passed
away a few days after the first draft of this book went to the publishers.
Peter was a great iconoclast, an advocate of racial and social justice who
wrote and edited unusually clearly and prolifically, a journalist with enor-
mous commitment (though his employer never knew the risks he took for
the ANC underground), an internationalist and regionalist whose socialist
spine never bent, and a man who immediately understood the campaigning
against global apartheid over which I enthused. He left us all with fondest
memories, including tossing typewriters out of buildings in frustration!
And then there are abundant Johannesburg friends, including those in
the debate journal and e-mail listserve, and patrons of the Workers Library
and Museum, the Supper Club in Berea, Peg’s jazz bistro in Troyeville, the
Wits Post-Grad Pub, Cosatu House, the NGO ghetto of Braamfontein,
Rockey Street, township shebeens and other motley hangouts.5
My publisher Solani Ngobeni at Juta/UCT Press encouraged me and
forgave my quirky schedule, and I warmly thank his staff for hard work and
forbearance. Additional gratitude is due to several editors, journals and
publishing houses for permission to revise articles and chapters for
inclusion below.6 The Human Sciences Research Council funded an early
investigation along these lines in 1997, and the International Development
Research Centre and University of Natal Centre for Social and
Development Studies were also benefactors. My son Jan was magnanimous
with patience, rooting for me as best he could in the real world, and always
asking the hardest questions.
And the numerous global justice movements kept us all focused, just as
did the many institutions and people responsible for the continuation of
Acknowledge 7/22/03 6:26 pm Page xviii
xviii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
global apartheid. Special thanks go to the World Bank and IMF for doing
more to unite social change activists across the globe than anything since
apartheid itself.
I have a feeling that all of those implicated above will be critical to our
future: mine, yours, South Africa’s and probably the world’s.
Patrick Bond
Johannesburg, May 2001
Notes
1 Going backwards to the point in mid-1998 when I began putting together these
arguments about resisting global apartheid for seminars, workshops and con-
ferences, many open-minded audiences heard portions of this book, and all
provided valuable feedback. In the first half of 2001, these included the Wits
University Graduate School of Public and Development Management’s seminar on
Advanced Topics in Political Economy and several other P&DM classes; the
Integrated Social Development Centre fora on development finance and water
privatisation in Accra; the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and
Negotiations Initiative conference on Financing for Development in Geneva;
Oxford University’s School of Geography; the World Council of Churches’ consul-
tation on the Bretton Woods institutions, Geneva; the University of Natal/Durban
Centre for Social and Development Studies; and in Windhoek, the Labour Research
and Resources Initiative’s Southern African Conference on Foreign Direct
Investment.
During 2000, I attended the South African Graduates Development
Association conference on student-worker alliances in Johannesburg; Kairos
Europa’s Financial Markets Consultation, Frankfurt; the NGO parallel session to
the G-20 Finance Ministers Meeting in Montreal; Columbia University’s Institute
of African Studies academic seminar, New York; the University of Cape Town
Graduate School of Business Seminar on Globalisation; the Southern African
Regional Institute for Policy Studies Colloquium on Southern African Integration,
Harare; the Ottawa Public Interest Research Group chapter meeting at Carleton
University; the International Development Research Centre seminar on gover-
nance, Ottawa; the Brecht Forum, New York; Hofstra University’s Department of
Political Science, New York; the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center,
Boulder, Colorado; a seminar held by the Center for Economic Justice and the
Center for Economic Policy Research, Washington; the University of Durban-
Westville’s inaugural Fanon Lecture; the African Network and Forum on Debt and
Development Project on Regional Applications of the Tobin Tax, Harare; the
Grahamstown Festival Wordfest; the Anglican Diocese conference on social and
economic change, Cape Town; the Africa Centre, London; the Bretton Woods
Reform Organisation, London; the United Nations University’s World Institute of
Development Economics Research, Helsinki; the Southern African Catholic
Bishops’ Conference Symposium on Strategies to Bridge the Gap Between Rich
and Poor in South Africa, Gauteng; the 50 Years is Enough Network seminar on
structural adjustment, Washington; the Departments of Sociology at Rhodes
University, East London campus and Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg; the
University of Port Elizabeth Department of Political Science; the SA National
Economic Policy Research Institute seminar on macroeconomic policy,
Acknowledge 7/22/03 6:26 pm Page xix
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS xix
Johannesburg; the University of California/Los Angeles Center for Social Theory

and Comparative History colloquium on Causes and Consequences of
Neoliberalism; gatherings at the Rainforest Action Network, Economic Justice
Network, International Rivers Network, and Global Exchange in San Francisco; a
Bank Information Center seminar, Washington; a York University conference on
The Global Working Class at the Millennium, Toronto; and a Monthly Review
lunchtime seminar in New York.
In 1999, I was invited to the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of
Comparative Political Studies conference on Globalisation and Alternatives to
Neoliberalism in Moscow; Oxfam’s Southern African Trade Union Council
Workshop on Trade and Investment, Johannesburg; the Globalization Monitor
Workshop’s Seminar on Global Strategies and Tactics, Hong Kong; the Korean
Association of Economic Geography Seminar on Global Economic Crisis, Seoul; the
Taegu Round Global Forum, Towards a New International Financial Order, South
Korea; the Sungkonghoe University’s International Conference on Neoliberalism,
Global Capitalism and Civil Alternatives, Seoul; a seminar of the Alliance for Global
Justice, Preamble Center, Essential Information and Results at the US House of
Representatives, Washington; the Union of Radical Political Economics Summer
Conference on Political Economy, the Environment and the Economic Crisis,
Connecticut; the Africa Council of Churches globalisation seminar in Manzini,
Swaziland; Jubilee 2000’s Africa Conference, Lusaka; Wits University’s School of
International Relations; Yokohama National University’s Department of Economics
masters course on globalisation and development; the Focus on the Global South
Conference on Economic Sovereignty in a Globalized World at Chulalongkorn
University, Bangkok; and Jubilee 2000’s Southern Africa Conference at Wits
University.
In 1998, I spoke at the Parliamentary Initiative on the Mozambican External
Debt at the Assembly of the Republic, Maputo; a York University Department of
Political Science seminar, Toronto; the NGO parallel conference to the IMF/World
Bank Annual Meetings, Washington; the Halifax Initiative’s parallel conference to
the Commonwealth Finance Ministerial Meetings, Ottawa; a World Resources
Institute, National Wildlife Federation and Friends of the Earth workshop on inter-
national financial regulation, Washington; the South African Parliamentary
Committee on Foreign Affairs, Cape Town; and the Foundation for Global
Dialogue, Department of Foreign Affairs and Department of Trade and Industry
conference, Preparing for the Non-Aligned Movement, Pretoria.
2 In Africa, my hosts were Charles Abugre and Rudolf Amenga-Etego (Accra);
Horacio Zandamela (Maputo); Peter Henriot and Chawe Mpanda (Lusaka); Tendai
Biti, Joan Brickhill, Jonah Gokuva, Opa Kapijimpanga, Davie Malungisa, John
Masimba Manyanya, Allast Mwanza, Sam Moyo, Tandeka Nkiwane, Helga
Patrikios, Brian Raftopoulos, Richard Saunders, Yash Tandon and John van’t Hoff
(Harare); Herbert Jauch (Windhoek); Heinrich Boehmke, Lisa Bornstein, Ashwin
Desai, Mary Galvin, David Moore, Percy More, Kiru Naidoo, Vishnu Padayachee,
Richard Pithouse and Imraan Valoodia (Durban); Susan Booysens and Boyce Papu
(Port Elizabeth); Azwell Banda, Russell Grinker, Sarah Hugow, Litha Mcwabeni
and Derrick Mosenthal (East London); and Mercia Andrews, Brian Ashley, Carl
Brecker, Mark Delene, Dot Keet, Thomas Koelble, Roger Ronnie, David Sanders
and Anna Weekes (Cape Town).
In Europe, hospitality and assistance were offered by Hein Marais, Rogate
Mshana and Bob Scott (Geneva); Niall Bond (Lyons); Ulrich Duchrow, Theo
Kneifel, and Anya Osterhaus (Frankfurt); Boris Kagarlitsky and Vladimir Shubin
Acknowledge 7/22/03 6:26 pm Page xx
xx A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
(Moscow); Mansoob Murshed (Helsinki); David Hall, Joe Hanlon, Alex Wilks,
Angela Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood (London); Karen Bakker, Tony Lemon and
Eric Swyngedouw (Oxford); and Paul Cammack (Manchester).
In North America, I am indebted to George Caffentzis, Greg DeFreitas, Sylvia
Federici, Doug Henwood, Vicki Larson, John Mage, Mzwanele Mayekiso, Andrew
Nash, Rachel Neumann, Louis Proyect, Danny Schechter and Maliq Simone (New
York); Steve Askin, Soren Ambrose, Moya Atkinson, Tony Avirgan, Jaron Bourke,
Joanne Carter, Jim Cason, Fantu Cheru, Dana Clark, Carole Collins, Andrea
Durbin, Bob Lenhard, Jon Liss, Lisa McGowan, Robert Naiman, Njoki Njehu,
Graham Saul, Tom Schlesinger, Todd Tucker, Neil Watkins, Mark Weisbrot, Rob
Weissman (Washington); David Barsamian, Denis Bond, David Martin and Julika
Slaby (Colorado); Beverly Bell (Alburquerque); Robert Brenner, Eric Mann and
Leanne Mann-Hurst (Los Angeles); Erick Brownstein, Kevin Danaher and Lori
Pottinger (San Francisco); Greg Albo, Sam Ginden, Roger Kiel, Colin Leys, Leo
Panitch, John and Pat Saul and Alan Zeuge (Toronto); Karen Emily, Pam Foster,
Robin Round and Christina Zarowsky (Ottawa); and Michel Chossudofsky and
Jaggi Singh (Montreal). In Mexico, Gustavo Castro, a masked Zapatista and Global
Exchange were excellent guides to Chiapas.
In Asia, warmest thanks go to Walden Bello, Nicola Bullard, Shalmali Guttal
and Kamal Malhotra (Bangkok); Kate Bond (Chiang Mai); Gerard Greenfield
(Hong Kong); Ji-hoon Choi, Chan-geun Lee and Won Soon Park (Seoul); Byongdoo
Choi, Chan Keun Lee and Serapina Cha Mi-Kyung (Taegu); and Keiichi Yamazaki
(Yokohama).
3 Thanks for their time, interest and insights to Hans Abrahamsson, Christophe
Aguiton, Katharine Ainger, Yilmaz Akyuz, Michael Albert, Samir Amin, Giovanni
Arrighi, Andy Banks, David Barkin, Alejandro Bendana, Eve Bertelsen, Fred
Bienefeld, Tom Bramble, Jeremy Brecher, Paul Burkett, Horace Campbell, John
Cavanagh, Camille Chalmers, Chris Chase-Dunn, Noam Chomsky, Harry Cleaver,
Alexander Cockburn, Jane D’Arista, Julie Davids, Paul Davis, Brad DeLong, Javes
Devine, Norm Dixon, Peter Dorman, Michael Dorsey, Fiona Dove, John Dylan,
Martina Egli, Ben Fine, Laura Flanders, Jonathan Fox, Susan George, John
Gershman, Jayati Ghosh, Bill Greider, Sara Grusky, Vineeta Gupta, Tony and Eve
Hall, Gillian Hart, Marty Hart-Landsberg, David Harvey, David Hemson, Joe
Iosbaker, Jomo KS, Mark Jones, Josh Karliner, Naomi Klein, Martin Khor, Tom
Kruse, Paul Kumar, Annie Leonard, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Jamie Love, Erin
McCandless, Paddy McCully, George Monbiot, Martin Murray, Vicente Navarro,
Anders Nielson, Leonce Ndikumana, Zar Ni, Jim O’Connor, Ezekiel Pajibo, Raj
Patel, Medha Patkar, Michael Perelman, John Pilger, Erik Reinert, Ian Roberts, Max
Sawicky, Art Serota, Anwar Shaikh, Jim Shultz, Jeff St. Clair, Carlos Vilas, Hilary
Wainwright, Immanuel Wallerstein, Peter Waterman, John Williams, Daphne
Wysham, Koh Young-joo and Iris Marion Young. All honed my line of argument,
even if perhaps not yet to each of my counselors’ satisfaction.
And in addition to books by writers listed in these notes, I gained a great deal
from reading Harry Shutt’s The Trouble with Capitalism (London, Zed, 1998),
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 2000), and especially Robert Biel’s The New Imperialism (London, Zed, 2000).
4 These include, amongst many, Tamara Braam, Peter Benjamin, Omano Edigheji,
Sharon Edigheji, Patrick Flusk, Prathima Garbharran, Tony Hercules, Llanley
Simpson, Tawanda Mutasah, Daniel Plaatjies, Horacio Zandamela, Langa Zita, and
all the participants in a memorable March–April 2001 Sabi seminar on globalisation.
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A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS xxi
5 In addition to those listed already, I must mention Johannesburg lefties Glenn Adler,
Peter Alexander, Matseleng Allais, Franco Barchiesi, Florencia Belvedere, Chris
Bolsmann, Eddie Cottle, Molly Dhlamini, Nick Dieltens, Ann Eveleth, Sean Flynn,
Bonnie Friedman, Steven Greenberg, Ferial Haffajee, Lisa Hoyos, Mazibuko Jara,
Meshack Khosa, Bridget Kenney, Ulriche Kistner, Majbritt Fiil Laugesen, Sarah de
Villiers Leach, Oupa Lehulere, Moses Majola, David Masondo, Dale Mckinley,
Andile Mngxitama, Darrell Moellendorf, Sam Moiloa, John Molefinyane, Johny
Mphou, Prishani Naidoo, Tebogo Phadu, Caroline Riley, Bobby Rodwell, Melanie
Samson, Virginia Setshedi, Richard Sherman, Robyn Stein, Nicole Ulrich, Salim
Vally, Lucien van der Walt, Maria van Driel and Ahmed Veriava.
6 Before sometimes quite extensive modification, the chapters below initially
appeared in the following forms:
• Preface: ‘Globalisation, Economic Crisis and South African Vulnerabilities’, in
M. Khosa (ed.), Empowerment through Economic Transformation, Pretoria,
Human Sciences Research Council, 2000.
• Chapter one: ‘Globalisation, African Economic Crisis and South African
Vulnerabilities’, African Communist, November 1999; and ‘Sustaining US
Hegemony: The Economic Factor’, in Solidarity for Social Progress (Korea),
February 2001.
• Chapter two: ‘The Southern African Working Class: Production, Reproduction
and Politics’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2001: The Global
Working Class at the Millennium, London, Merlin and New York, Monthly
Review Press, 2000; and ‘Regionalism, Environment and the Southern African
Proletariat’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 11(3), September 2000.
• Chapter three: ‘The IMF and World Bank Reconsidered’, in J. Coetsee, J. Graaf,
F. Hendricks and G. Wood (eds), Development: Theory, Policy and Practice,
Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Chapter four: ‘Foreign Aid and Development: South Africa’s Negative
Experiences and Perceptions, 1994–99’, Transformation, 45, 2001.
• Chapter five: ‘Global Economic Crisis: A View from South Africa’, Journal of
World Systems Research, 5(2), 1999; and ‘Their Reforms and Ours: The Balance
of Forces that Inform a New Global Financial Architecture’, in W. Bello, K.
Malhutra and N. Bullard (eds), Cooling Down Capital: How to Regulate
Financial Markets, London, Zed Press, 2000.
• Chapter six: ‘Pretoria’s Perspectives on Globalisation’, Politikon, 28(1), 2001.
• Chapter seven: ‘Can Thabo Mbeki Change the World?’, in R. Calland and S.
Jacobs (eds), Thabo Mbeki, Cape Town, IDASA, and Pietermaritzburg,
University of Natal Press, 2002.
• Chapter eight: ‘Globalisation, Pharmaceutical Pricing and South African Health
Policy: Managing Confrontation with US Firms and Politicians’, International
Journal of Health Services, 29(4), 1999.
• Chapter nine: ‘The Political Economy of HIV/AIDS Treatment Policy in South
Africa’, International Journal of Health Services, 31(2), 2001.
• Chapter ten: ‘Strategy, Self-Activity and African Grassroots Roles in the “Anti-
Globalisation” Movement’, in G. Kohler and E. J. Chaves (eds), Globalization:
Critical Perspectives, New York, Nova Press, 2001.
• Chapter eleven: ‘Defunding the Fund, Running on the Bank’, Monthly Review,
52(1), 2000.
• Chapter twelve: ‘A History of Finance and Uneven Geographical Development
in South Africa’, South African Geographical Journal, 80(1), 1998.
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xxii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
In addition, a variety of popular publications have carried shorter versions of the

arguments in the pages below. These include: Against the Current, Americas Update,
Business Day, Development Update, Focus on Trade, Global Dialogue, Green Left
Weekly, Indicator SA, International Viewpoint, Land and Rural Policy Digest,
Leadership, Left Business Observer, Lokayan Bulletin, Mail and Guardian, Mots
Pluriel, Multinational Monitor, New Routes, Southern Africa Report, Sunday
Independent, Sunday World, Third World Resurgence, Watching the World Bank in
Southern Africa, and ZNet.
Finally, it is of some amusement to me that two sections of the last chapter –
‘Comparative capital controls’ and ‘Exchange control options for South Africa’ –
were accepted for publication by two reviewers of the South African Journal of
Economics during a nine-month period in 1999–2000. But the piece was then
rejected by a new editor and third reviewer, whose explanation in April 2001
suggests either the durability of market-Stalinism in the local economics profession,
or – as the reviewer confesses below – a material self-interest in not igniting an
informed debate on capital controls. Here are excerpts from the review:
Should the SAJE publish a paper in favour of capital controls suited to a left-
wing-, labour- or ‘Keynesian’ audience? Should the SAJE publish a paper in
favour of financial market liberalisation targeted at a right-wing, business- or
‘Neo-Classical’ audience? I think it should not lend itself to publish either …
The vulnerability of SA’s economy to international financial flows is actually a
good thing. The reason is that it imposes constraints on macro and micro policies.
Basically, it lowers domestic policy autonomy, because if these policies are bad
they will be reflected in capital outflows and a weaker currency …
I strongly disagree that financial market liberalisation imposes inappropriate
policy discipline on sovereign states. Rather, it is a blessing in disguise because it
dishes out penalty points immediately to failing governments and policies such as
is partly the case in SA (especially w.r.t. the labour market, product market and
delays over privatisation) …
The US trade deficit is not unsustainable … Following the ‘Washington
Consensus’ has worked extremely well for the USA, Canada, Europe etc. Just do
a plot of per capita GDP and free market institutions. Of course, interesting
countries that did not follow the Washington Consensus are for example
Tanzania and Zambia. Since independence they followed socialist policies.
Where are they now? …
The unmotivated demand for just ‘lower interest rates’ doesn’t make any sense
nor does it inspire any confidence in the author’s economics background …
I don’t think it is feasible that SA takes a bold global leadership position on
restoring domestic financial security …
The present 15 percent restriction of foreign portfolio investment should be
seen as another ‘tax’ on residents. If I could, the larger share of my assets would
be in the USA say, not in RSA.
At the same moment that the ostrich-like economists were blocking discussion of the
merits of exchange controls in their professional journal, the South African govern-
ment – with the approval of even Business Day newspaper columnists (27 February
and 5 March 2001) – toughened existing controls in the 2001 budget.
Acronyms 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page xxiii
Acronyms
ALF-CIO American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial

Organizations
ANC African National Congress
BMS Bristol-Myers Squibb
BoP balance of payments
BSAC British South Africa Company
CBO community-based organisation
CHOGM Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting
CoNGO co-opted NGO
Cosatu Congress of South African Trade Unions
DTI Department of Trade and Industry
EDL essential drugs list
EPZ export processing zone
ESAP Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (in
Zimbabwe)
EU European Union
FAO Food and Agriculture Organisation
FDI foreign direct investment
FNB First National Bank
Fosatu Federation of South African Trade Unions
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GDP gross domestic product
Gear Growth, Employment and Redistribution (policy)
HIPC highly indebted poor country
ICU Industrial and Commercial Union
IDASA Institute for a Democratic South Africa
IFC International Finance Corporation
IMF International Monetary Fund
ISI import substitution industrialisation
JSE JSE Securities Exchange
LHWP Lesotho Highlands Water Project
MDC Movement for Democratic Change
MIGA Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
NAL Non-aligned Movement
NDA National Development Agency
Acronyms 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page xxiv
xxiv A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID
NIEP National Institute of Economic Policy

NGO non-governmental organisation
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development
PHC primary health care
PhRMA The Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America
PRC People’s Republic of China
PRD Party of Revolutionary Democracy
PRI Party of Institutional Revolution
PRSP poverty reduction strategy paper
R&D research and development
RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme
SACP South African Communist Party
SADC Southern African Development Community
SACTUCC South African Trade Union Co-ordinating Council
Sangoco South African Non-governmental Coalition
SAP structural adjustment programme
SAPA South African Press Association
SDI spatial development initiative
Swapo South West African People’s Organisation
TAC Treatment Action Campaign
TEC Transitional Executive Council
TI Transparency International
TNC transnational corporation
TNDT Transitional National Development Trust
TRIPS trade in intellectual property rights
UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence
UN United Nations
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Emergency Relief Fund
USAID United States Agency for International Development
USTR United States Trade Representative
WTO World Trade Organisation
ZANU Zimbabwe African National Union
ZCTU Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions
Photo Spread 7/22/03 6:45 pm Page xxv
Top: Prof. Fatima Meer, official biographer of Nelson Mandela and leading
social justice activist, Durban, March 2000.
Bottom: Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, and Truth
and Reconciliation Commissioner, Yasmin Sooka, Davos, January 2001.
Photo Spread 7/22/03 6:45 pm Page xxvi
Top: Anti-apartheid poet Dennis Brutus, Prague, September 2000.

Bottom: Political activist Trevor Ngwane and Finance Minister
Trevor Manuel, Washington, April 2000.
Part 1 7/22/03 6:44 pm Page 1
PA R T ONE
Powers and vulnerabilities
Neville Gabriel of Jubilee, South Africa, debates Bretton Woods officials

Tom Dawson, Mamphela Ramphele and Mats Karlsson, Prague, September
2000.
Part 1 7/22/03 6:44 pm Page 2
Top: Davie Malungisa of the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development

and Molly Dhlamini, Wits student leader, Washington, April 2000.
Bottom: IMF acting managing director Stanley Fischer and World Bank
president James Wolfensohn, Washington, April 2000.
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 3
CHAPTER ONE
Global crisis, African oppression
1. Introduction
Rather than repeat the standard litany of pity and frustration over Africa’s
rock-bottom living standards and the minimal power and influence its
states possess in the arena of international relationships, let’s begin by
examining the continent’s problems in the context of the ongoing world-
wide economic crisis – with the aim of explaining why the economic decay
faced by South Africa and lower-income countries of the South reflect
global, not merely Third World, chaos.
To do so, we turn first to the analysis of South Africa’s current (2001)
ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), of the global economic
crisis and its implications for South Africa.1 This discussion document,
which appeared in October 1998, was co-authored by Joel Netshitenzhe of
the ANC and Jeremy Cronin of the South African Communist Party, along
with the then-leader of one of the world’s most dynamic trade union move-
ments, Mbhazima Shilowa of the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu).
These central players in what is known as the Tripartite Alliance (which is
made up of the three organisations mentioned) were mandated to argue a
case within the ruling coalition. They had no qualms about using the ‘c’
word in their argument (even if, as we will observe later, this was mainly
bluster), so nor should we:
The present crisis is, in fact, a global capitalist crisis, rooted in a classical
crisis of overaccumulation and declining profitability. Declining profitability
has been a general feature of the most developed economies over the last
25 years. It is precisely declining profitability in the most advanced
economies that has spurred the last quarter of a century of intensified global-
ization. These trends have resulted in the greatly increased dominance (and
exponential growth in the sheer quantity) of speculative finance capital,
ranging uncontrolled over the globe in pursuit of higher returns.2
Grating as it might sound to the uninitiated, the paragraph above is a
helpful summary of three processes that will be examined below (in
Section 2):
4 P OWERS AND VULNERABILITIES
1) falling profits combined with systematic overproduction;

2) the geographical expansion by transnational corporations in response to
stagnation in home markets; and
3) the simultaneous reach by capital across time and space, through a
credit mechanism that permits consumption now, payment later.
In these ways, we will see, capital responds to crisis by shifting and stalling
its problems.
If this still seems excessively abstract, it won’t remain so once we track
the deadly implications of the crisis. For Africa, they are multifaceted, and
worthy of far more attention than I give them in Section 3 of this introduc-
tory chapter, which primarily considers aspects of trade and debt that
follow from the long-term global economic crisis. Nevertheless, I will
conclude in Section 4 that if current trends are very depressing, matters
must soon change, potentially in progressive directions. For I believe that
global crisis management will soon be exhausted, and with a break in power
relations, even the most venal African political/economic relations can then
be challenged from below, in a way that could lead us from the current
stage of despondency to a higher one of strategic clarity and mass activism.
2. Global crisis, and crisis displacement

The term ‘crisis’ is understood in many ways. In the economic context, one
of the ways in which people experience crisis is as a time when power gets
exercised in brutally obvious ways on behalf of uncaring economic forces.
At such times, the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies often repre-
sents the point at which the most powerful corporate and financial agents
get their way in the given country. And with a shift of influence towards
Washington’s preferred ideology comes demands for dramatic cuts in local
standards of living. Hence, one metaphor of the last quarter of a century of
global economic change is of knots in the economic rope tied around the
necks of ordinary people getting ever tighter and digging ever deeper, of
which I give only a few key examples here:
the economic policies of disciples of Milton Friedman (i.e. young
Chilean bureaucrats with doctorates in economics from the University
of Chicago) strangling Chile from 1973, once Augusto Pinochet had
killed democratically elected Salvador Allende and began imposing the
first thorough-going neo-liberal strategy;
the resurgent International Monetary Fund (IMF) dictating British
macroeconomic policy in 1976 at a point when the Labour Party was
desperate for a loan, even prior to Thatcherism;
the brutal reign of Paul Volcker at the US Federal Reserve beginning in
1979, snuffing out inflation with dramatic interest rate increases (the
catalyst for the Third World debt crisis), followed quickly by Ronald
G LOBAL CRISIS , A FRICAN OPPRESSION 5
Reagan’s devastating attacks on US trade unions and the social wage,

combined with military attacks on those few Third World states
(Nicaragua, Grenada, Mozambique, etc.) that dared to be different;
the IMF’s hard-line reaction to Mexico’s 1982 bankruptcy, which
heralded Washington’s capacity to impose ‘structural adjustment’ and
simultaneously bail out the New York, London, Frankfurt, Zurich and
Tokyo banks;
the World Bank’s shift from project funding alone to the imposition of
structural adjustment and sectoral adjustment, done in the name of
making countries more competitive and efficient, but in reality wiping
out decades’ worth of improvement in living standards;
the series of crisis-management techniques (such as the Baker and Brady
Plans) during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which helped get danger-
ous Third World debt off the books of Northern banks by socialising
their losses through new IMF and World Bank loans, though not with-
out heightened demands from the banks concerned for repayment by
wretched borrowers; and
the renewed austerity that accompanied the late-1990s ‘emerging-
markets crises’, amidst further bailouts for investment bankers exposed
in countries whose hard currency reserves were suddenly depleted by
runs.
Yet the problems run far deeper than the particular instances in which
sovereignty was ceded to financial markets, or neo-liberal ideology was
adopted locally by home-grown structural adjusters, or stop-gap measures
were imposed by Washington to redistribute resources from poor to rich,
from producers to financiers, and from South to North. Instead, I believe
the ANC Alliance’s intellectual leaders were correct when in 1998 they
identified the underlying issue as the ‘overaccumulation of capital’. It is
therefore to a discussion of this concept that we now turn.
A brief theory of crisis

The term ‘overaccumulation’ is classical Marxist jargon, but this should not
in itself mean that the term is no longer relevant, now that most of the
governments that once claimed to espouse Marxism no longer do so. I
believe that if the concept of overaccumulation uniquely defines the root
causes of the current economic crisis, it should not be dismissed as an
outdated idea that no longer applies.
‘Overaccumulation’ refers to a condition combining too high a level of
productive capacity, too many inventories, too great a proportion of capital
invested in financial assets, and too many people without paid employment.
Perhaps the best evidence that overaccumulation has in fact set in is a struc-
tural decline in the rate of profit in productive-sector economic activities,
especially traditional manufacturing. This is typically caused by gluts of

production, insufficient buying power or intensified class struggle.
Depending upon the state of class struggle, Marx described how a falling
rate of profit could be reversed. In Das Kapital, he talked of the ‘absolute’
and ‘relative’ ways of increasing surplus value so as to restore profits.3 The
former refers to making workers toil longer and harder with the same tech-
nology, and the latter to the replacement of workers with capital-intensive
machines in search of at least temporary efficiencies that might momentar-
ily raise profits, in a competitive economic environment (prior to the gener-
alised adoption of the technology by all producers). But these methods
never work out so simply, and do not stave off structural declines in pro-
ductive-sector profit rates for long. There is only so much ‘absolute’
exploitation that can be accomplished – through sweat-shop conditions, the
speeding up of assembly lines, outsourcing to cheaper sites (typically with
much lower wages and no benefits), and various ways of forcing workers to
accept more ‘flexible’ work arrangements – before limits are reached. And
as for ‘relative’ surplus value, after an initial boost, the substitution of
machines for workers both lowers the capacity for exploitation of labour
(because output is now increasingly a function of machinery and less of
value-adding labour) and generates even more output – far more than can
be readily consumed. The problem essentially is that capitalism generates
accumulation of wealth for owners only because living labour is the source
of added value. As labour’s role in production recedes, the class power that
capital enjoys over workers, from which profits are derived, also recedes. A
productive capitalist doesn’t enjoy the same class power over another capi-
talist (e.g. one who sells the machinery that replaces the workers), and so
the system tends towards declining profitability.
While capitalism is inexorably overproductive, an outright ‘crisis’ sets in
at a stage when the economy suffers such high overcapacity, such gluts of
industrial and consumer goods, such heightened intercapitalist competi-
tion, such untenable levels of idle labour, and also such severe environ-
mental damage and brutal exploitation of women and children, topped off
by such extreme financial speculation, that the whole system starts to melt
down. There have been numerous such examples throughout history, with
the early part of the 21st century destined to follow the pattern of earlier
international financial collapses (the mid-1810s, the late 1840s, the early
1870s, the mid-1890s, the late 1910s and the early 1930s).
Yet this destiny – capitalism’s inner self-contradictory tendencies regu-
larly coming to full fruition, in the way that Marx predicted – has been
successfully postponed since the latest crisis began to unfold from the early
1970s, when the profit plunge and rise of gluts across many terrains of
production became noticeable. The tactics used to achieve this process, i.e.
the ‘stalling and shifting’ of the crisis, will be discussed below.
This is not to say that the crisis has not been apparent, particularly from
Africa’s perspective, as I will show below. Financial meltdowns have been
visited upon a vast number of places and people across the globe since the
1970s, and have damaged the planet at a dramatic rate. The broader
economic crisis even left the working class in the United States with a 20%
collapse of per-worker wage-related income over a two-decade period
(1975–95).
Overall, however, it is crucial to acknowledge that Washington has so far
successfully co-ordinated the ‘management’ and ‘displacement’ of crisis
conditions. These crisis-displacement techniques, and the growing resis-
tance to them, are the subjects that occupy the rest of this book. But at the
outset, it is important to identify some key patterns in this process.
Stalling and shifting the crisis

In the process of staving off a full-blown meltdown, elites employ a variety
of response mechanisms to crisis. These responses can mainly be under-
stood by considering their somewhat different philosophies and interests,
which will be explained further in Chapter five. But in general, five factors
associated with elite management have sustained the capitalist system
during the current crisis: surprisingly creative economic crisis management;
the large cushioning role of nation-state expenditure (compared to, say, the
early 1930s); the unparalleled power of Washington’s overall techno-
military apparatus; the control of virtually all major nation states by
business-oriented political parties (including the so-called ‘Third Way’
social-democratic parties of the late 1990s); and an extremely effective ‘class
war’ against the working-class and poor. As a result, a 1929–33-style
financial seizure and subsequent Great Depression has so far been avoided.
This can be expressed conceptually through the processes of ‘shifting’
and ‘stalling’. In contrast to the last few troughs of the international
economic cycle, which were characterised by generalised collapse, the
contemporary crisis has been both moved around geographically (‘globalisa-
tion’) and delayed (through credit and financial speculation). The thesis I will
pursue is that at a deep-rooted level, two linked processes have drawn
together the North and South (and demolished the East) in a unified
process of displacement of overaccumulated capital. These two processes
make up the way in which the financial and trading systems re-engineer
space and time relations, i.e. the twinned processes of shifting and stalling.4
The new crisis-displacement processes entail more than simply standard
‘countervailing tendencies against the falling profit rate’ (Marx’s reference
to relative and absolute surplus value extraction). The notion of finan-
cial/commercial crisis-displacement hints at the capacity of the system’s
most powerful elements to retard devaluation of overaccumulated capital
and move it around. Devaluation represents the final recognition that
returns on specific overaccumulated capital cannot, ultimately, be realised.

The capital – and likewise people, in the form of the unemployed masses –
have to be written off, in ways that include defaults on financial obligations,
bank failures, dramatic declines in living standards, structured inflation,
recessions and depressions.
Throughout the history of capitalist boom-bust cycles, shifting and
stalling the inevitable devaluation of overaccumulated capital has always
been a matter of geopolitical power derived largely from financial control
mechanisms.5 Whether a particular geopolitical bloc can push the devalua-
tion somewhere else depends upon who is controlling the switch-points of
the financial and commercial circuits of capital. These circuits – understood
as flows of finance and commodities across space – are always to be found
where overaccumulation pressure is most rapidly and intensively transmit-
ted, and also where uneven development is most actively generated, partic-
ularly in the periodic expansion and contraction of global debt and
speculative bubbles.6
There are concrete reasons for these financial and trade dynamics. In
part, exuberant financial activity can be traced to high returns from specu-
lative markets and from high interest rates paid on financial assets, during
a period in which private financiers gain the power to dictate monetary
policy to allegedly ‘independent’ central banks.7 Of the $1.5 trillion
involved in daily currency-market activity across the world, a tiny fraction
is used for trade- or investment-related transactions. The entire volume of
global trade in 1998 – $6.5 trillion – could have been financed through
merely 4.3 days worth of forex market turnover. The additional daily trade
in derivatives (i.e. securities whose returns are based on movements in the
price of other paper assets) was $973 billion in 1998. In contrast, the total
official foreign reserves held by all central banks amounted to just $1.6 tril-
lion.8 Therefore, virtually no single country has the reserves to withstand a
co-ordinated attack by financial speculators.
Who gains from this apparently parasitic financial activity? The volatility
of global money markets in part reflects the self-interest that international
commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and other financiers
have in manipulating funds. The mere movement of money generates
profits through price changes, as well as through trading commissions. The
merits of such casino capitalism were expressed in the Annual Report 1998
of Standard Chartered Bank (which was founded in Port Elizabeth in 1857,
but which disinvested from South Africa 130 years later), in which forex
trading profits were responsible for ‘outstanding’ results: ‘We have built a
world-class team and their ability to continue trading, during periods of
high volatility in the foreign exchange markets, resulted in exceptional deal-
ing profitability.’9
Table 1: US financial-asset profits: inflation-adjusted long-term interest rates

and average annual returns on stocks and bonds, 1940s–90s10
Decade Interest rates Stocks Bonds

1940s –3.2 4.9 –1.1
1950s 1.0 14.2 –4.1
1960s 2.2 4.4 –2.7
1970s –0.2 4.2 –7.4
1980s 4.8 10.2 7.4
1990s 4.1 11.0 9.2
Part of the attraction to such financial overexposure is that world interest

rates hovered at historic highs from around 1980, both in the United States
(see Table 1) and especially in emerging markets. As a result, corporations
achieved much higher ‘real’ (i.e. inflation-adjusted) rates of return when
they shifted resources from overaccumulated productive circuits into finan-
cial assets.
Here we arrive at a crucial point in the argument, as illustrated by the
‘hollowing’ of many major manufacturing firms, which found that their
treasuries were making more money simply by reinvesting retained earnings
in financial assets. As manufacturing-sector profits fell, therefore, new capi-
tal spending by US non-financial corporations declined from levels in
excess of 8.5% of GDP during the 1950s–60s, to less than 7% during the
1970s, to 4.7% during the 1980s, before recovering slightly to 5.3% from
1990 to 1997.11
Meanwhile, profit rates plus salaries in the US financial, insurance and
real-estate sectors, as a percentage of gross investment, soared from
20–30% returns during the 1950s–70s up to the 35–45% range during the
1980s–90s, and the ‘rentier’ share (i.e. interest plus dividends) of the US
corporate surplus (i.e. pretax profits plus interest) rose from levels of
20–30% during the 1950s, to 30–40% during the 1960s–70s, to 50–70%
during the 1980s–90s. In the trading arena, geopolitical power also assists
those corporations based in strong states, because trade agreements are
conducted from a position of strength, and because Washington-imposed
structural adjustments force weaker states to lower tariff barriers.
In short, financial and commercial circuits of capital move the devaluation
around spatially (remember that devaluation is the only way to address the
problem of overaccumulation), so serving as the catalyst for much of the con-
temporary globalisation of capital. And simultaneously, overaccumulation is
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 10
addressed temporally, through hastened speed-up processes and, crucially,

by expanding a credit system which permits traded goods to be purchased
today but paid for later, on the assumption that future streams of surplus
value can be extracted and realised. So, as overaccumulation persists and the
resultant devaluation is shifted, labour, women (as workers and in the
labour-reproduction process) and the environment are more frenetically
exploited. This happens more in the South than the North, thanks to territo-
rial power differentials, though virtually no corner of the earth has been
exempt. The contradictions intrinsic to capitalism are, however, not resolved
in the process. They are instead moved, delayed, and ultimately amplified.
Financial power/fragility
Tracking the phenomenon of rising financial influence and volatility helps
us understand and react to Washington’s co-ordination of crisis ‘manage-
ment’ (if it deserves that purposive term). The volatility of the international
financial system since the mid-1970s stems from several factors:
profound changes in the incentive structure of investments, including a
decline in manufacturing profits during the late 1960s and a consequent
switch by many major firms of productive reinvestment into financial
assets;
the rise of the information society and economy;
institutional factors associated with financial sector concentration and
centralisation;
the diminishing power of nation states;
shortened investor time horizons; and
heightened geographic mobility, resulting in part from more rapid trans-
port and communications and other revolutionary technological
changes.
Several specific features are worth mentioning to provide a more detailed

sense of how the fabric of contemporary international finance has been
tearing at the edges. From the early 1970s, the destruction of the Bretton
Woods system – i.e. fixed exchange rates anchored by the US dollar (as I
will explain below) – the world economy has witnessed upheavals of a kind
not experienced since the 1930s. Once President Richard Nixon delinked
the dollar from gold (as a result of excessive pressure on US reserves subse-
quent to US overseas investment and the Vietnam War) – an action that
amounted to an $80 billion default on US obligations – the dollar went into
a steep decline (see Chapter 5 for more details). One result during the
1970s was a rise in the nominal price of gold from $35/oz in 1944–71 to
$850/oz in 1981, as investors sought refuge from the dollar. (In inflation-
adjusted terms, using 1998 as a base year, the rise was from $150/oz to
$1 250/oz over that period.)
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 11
But gold then fell in value (to just over $250 at its low point in mid-1999)
as interest rates were raised to very high levels by the US Federal Reserve
Board from 1979, finally stabilising the US dollar and giving investors a
better return on assets than they got by holding gold. Simultaneously, in
spite of the disincentive of high interest rates, debt rose dramatically virtu-
ally everywhere, partly thanks to universal financial deregulation, which
opened up more credit-related products to corporations and ordinary
people.
In the US, for example, the ratio of all forms of credit-market debt to
GDP was fairly stable, in the 130–150% range from 1950 to 1975. It then
soared to 250% over the next two decades. As another reflection of finan-
cial/commercial turbulence, international commodity prices in general
suffered enormous downward pressure, losing more than 80% of their
value from a 1973 peak. At the same time, overinvestment in manufac-
turing began to result in growing gluts of products, which were exacerbated
when East Asian products flooded global markets during the 1980s and
1990s.
In the context of such commotion, it wasn’t long before various surface-
level financial bubbles began bursting in increasingly spectacular ways: the
Third World debt crisis (early 1980s for commercial lenders, but lasting up
to the present for the countries and societies involved); energy finance
shocks (mid-1980s); crashes of international stock markets (1987) and
property markets (1991–3); crises in nearly all the large emerging markets
(1995–2000); and even huge individual bankruptcies, which caused power-
ful international ripples. Examples from the late 1990s of financial/specu-
lative gambles gone very sour in derivatives, exotic stock-market positions,
currency trading and bad bets on commodity futures and interest rate
futures include Long-Term Capital Management ($3.5 billion in 1998), the
Sumitomo/London Metal Exchange (£1.6 billion in 1996), I.G.
Metallgessellschaft ($2.2 billion in 1994), Kashima Oil ($1.57 billion in
1994), Orange County, California ($1.5 billion in 1994), Barings Bank (£900
million in 1995), the Belgian government ($1 billion in 1997) and Union
Bank of Switzerland ($690 million in 1998).
Such financial shocks are likely to continue, for even the US economy has
grown increasingly vulnerable to substantial corrections on the basis of
unsustainable trade and debt imbalances (the current account deficit
reached 4.5% by the end of 2000), consumer and corporate borrowing (an
unprecedented 7% of GDP by the end of 2000), and stock-market over-
valuation. The latter was only partially corrected by the crash in 2000–01 of
most Nasdaq high-technology shares, exemplified by the destruction of half
the paper value of companies like Intel and Apple Computer over the
course of a few hours once they had issued profit warnings. In a few such
cases, wealthy investors were hurt. But mainly the world’s working-class
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 12
and poor and vulnerable groups and environments have paid the bill for the
financiers’ problems. The middle-income emerging markets were hit in
particularly acute ways during the late 1990s, with no end in sight to their
predicament.
The emerging-markets crisis

Cases of emerging markets in crisis allow more specific consideration of
what has gone wrong in global financial markets, and whether there are any
proposals on the table that provide reasonable prospects for financial
sustainability and efficiency. In the period following the first round of
brutal austerity (1982–91), as Northern economies were slow to recover
from the early 1990s recession, large flows of speculative money arrived in
stock-markets and bond markets of those middle-income countries that
promised exchange-rate liberalisation. Hundreds of billions of dollars
poured into Asian, Latin American and even two African countries, South
Africa and Zimbabwe, during the 1990s.
But this ‘hot money’ fled as quickly as it came in. Financial chaos then
erupted in Mexico in late 1994 (just over a fortnight after Bill Clinton
publicly welcomed that country to the ‘First World’ of developed nations),
and quickly moved to other countries in Latin America and then South
Africa (early 1996 and mid-1998), South-east Asia (1997–8), South Korea
(early 1998), Russia (periodic, but especially mid-1998), Brazil and Ecuador
(1999), and Turkey and Argentina (2000–1).
In virtually all cases, the damage included huge drops in local financial
markets and currency values, runs on the foreign reserves held in central
banks, massive economic dislocations, and social austerity imposed through
draconian increases in interest rates and cuts in state budgetary allocations.
Meanwhile, bailouts allowed those lucky investors (especially from the
North) who could convert their funds into hard currency an escape route.
In 1997–2000 alone, the bailouts consumed $250 billion in funds mainly
gathered together by the US Treasury and IMF. The bailouts were not gifts,
but instead raised Third World debt over the $2 trillion mark, and under-
mined national sovereignty in a qualitatively new way.
As I will discuss in Chapter five, below, some countries did manage to
avoid Washington-sourced macroeconomic policy advice more easily than
others, mainly by regulating capital flows and their currencies. But while
responses to global economic turbulence have differed, there is growing
evidence to suggest that in the context of a series of 1980s–90s financial
bubbles, the common feature of the ongoing emerging-markets crisis was
that during the 1990s, most middle-income countries made themselves far
too vulnerable to inflows of short-term portfolio investments. Those port-
folio investments were not directed into sustainable production, but
instead were attracted by high returns in purely financial/speculative
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 13
terms. This fundamental problem is now widely acknowledged, even by

leading financiers.
In his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, George Soros conceded that
‘market forces, if they are given complete authority even in the purely
economic and financial arena, produce chaos and could ultimately lead to
the downfall of the global capitalist system.’12 In a Financial Times article
penned during the worst period of East Asia’s meltdown in 1997, Soros
concluded:
The private sector is ill-suited to allocate international credit. It provides
either too little or too much. It does not have the information with which to
form a balanced judgment. Moreover, it is not concerned with maintaining
macroeconomic balance in the borrowing countries. Its goals are to
maximise profit and minimise risk. This makes it move in a herd-like fashion
in both directions. The excess always begins with overexpansion, and the
correction is always associated with pain.13
The crisis resolved?

Yet in Washington, global authorities insisted that their self-acknowledged
ad hoc solutions were indeed resolving international financial turbulence.
Beginning with the first major emerging-market bailout ($57 billion to
investors in Mexico in 1995), and increasing rapidly as the dangers of melt-
down and deflation peaked in August 1998, when Russia defaulted on
sovereign debt-repayment obligations, the ‘Wall Street-Treasury Complex’
– in the words of conservative Columbia University economist Jagdish
Bhagwati14 – found sufficient money and imposed adequate technical solu-
tions to avert and even extinguish the most serious problems. According to
this line of thinking, the following policy measures (and a large measure of
good fortune) prevented a 1930s-style international financial panic:
the successful public/private bailout of the Long-Term Capital
Management hedge fund in September 1998;
slightly looser Federal Reserve monetary policy adopted in
September–October 1998;
a new, $90 billion IMF Contingent Credit Line announced in October
1998 and formalised in May 1999;
the convening of a forum on financial stability made up of key countries;
the lack of financial contagion (contrary to expectations) in the wake of
Brazil’s currency meltdown in January 1999;
the long-awaited revival, however tentative, of the Japanese economy (at
present, in April 2001, this seems to have ground to a halt);
new plans for somewhat more transparent budgetary and exchange-rate
systems in emerging markets;
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 14
a decision at the Cologne meeting of the G-8 in June 1999 to sell 10%
of the IMF’s gold to fund partial debt relief for the poorest Third World
countries;
statements by Britain’s Gordon Brown – in his role as head of the IMF
Interim Committee – indicating a desire to step up the IMF’s existing
capacities in areas of financial supervision and regulation;
the assembly of a ‘G-20’ group in September 1999 – led by Canadian
finance minister Paul Martin and including South African finance
minister Manuel – that includes many major emerging-market finance
ministers, to discuss further reform of global finance and other crisis-
avoidance techniques;
the proposal by President Bill Clinton at the IMF/World Bank meetings
in 1999 to write off 100% of debt owed to the US by 36 of the world’s
poorest countries, adding to momentum towards a millennial ‘gift’ to
avoid the extraordinary marginalisation of the ‘Fourth World’ that has
been noted in countless recent reports (a proposal followed 14 months
later by Britain);
the emergence of sufficient confidence within the international financial
system in late 1999 to allow Ecuador to default on its Brady Bond obli-
gations;
the successful interventions of the US and allied governments that
shored up the value of the newly introduced, fast-falling European
Union (EU) currency, the euro, in September 2000; and
further bailouts of desperate countries in late 2000, especially Turkey
and Argentina.
Ongoing financial insecurity

But can soothing words and interventions from Washington and elsewhere
prevent the various financial bubbles from bursting, given that investor
bailouts invariably cause new bubbles somewhere else? Alan Greenspan,
chairman of the Federal Reserve, had tried repeatedly to persuade New
York stock-market investors that their ‘irrational exuberance’ should be
reconsidered, but this had no effect until the 50% crash of the Nasdaq
index in 2000–1. For at the same time that the key Washington managers
of international economics – Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Stanley
Fischer and their colleagues – insisted that matters were under control,
evidence of much deeper and more dangerous tensions continued mount-
ing. Even the much-celebrated US economy suffered vast, unprecedented
trade and budget deficits, dramatically overindebted consumers and corpo-
rations, and a stock-market more overvalued than in 1929.
One indication of an underlying concern with ongoing financial crises
was a new IMF plan revealed by IMF managing director Michel Camdessus
in March 1999, to unite foreign bankers so as to avoid fracturing their
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 15
power in forthcoming bankruptcy negotiations with sovereign states.

Camdessus spoke behind the scenes to an Institute of International Bankers
meeting in Washington of the parallel need for ‘creditor councils’ that disci-
pline ‘individual dissident creditors’ who catalyse ‘panic-stricken asset-
destructive episodes’ through overzealous foreclosure actions.15 (Ignoring
this warning, however, one such dissident creditor, in the form of a so-called
‘vulture fund’, bought Ecuador’s secondary market debt very cheaply and
in October 2000 acquired a New York City court order allowing it to attach
Ecuadorian assets.)
But aside from the periodic stalling and shifting gambits, there was little
or nothing done at a structural level to prevent the massive asset destruc-
tion associated with international speculative runs on the currencies of
Third World countries, including South Africa. For a brief period in 1998,
it appeared that some preventative measures might emerge from social-
democratic politicians in Germany, France, Italy and Japan. However, as I
discuss in more detail in Chapter five, the resignation of Oskar Lafontaine,
German minister of finance, in March 1999 represented a profound setback
for this possibility, and the Japanese failed on several occasions to establish
an Asian Monetary Fund to provide country bailouts without extreme IMF-
style austerity as a result of vetoes by the US Treasury Department.
Partly for political reasons related to the funding of congressional and
presidential elections by financial institutions, and partly because financial
markets have an inordinate power in their own right, it became apparent
that Washington – i.e. the US Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and
multilateral financial agencies that are subject to Washington’s veto clout –
was fundamentally opposed to interfering with the prerogatives of major
banks and other international creditors. Even the often-suggested co-ordi-
nated regulation of interest rates amongst the major powers is unlikely to
happen. Although Washington conceded the need for greater transparency
in international financial transactions, in a world of derivatives trading and
private-private debt relationships, it was virtually impossible to track flows
of funds and to establish an accurate picture of a given country’s external
assets and liabilities.
The only substantial step toward financial security taken by Washington
since 1998, a global bailout fund for emerging-market countries that agree
to pay a substantial interest premium for short-term credit, was conceptually
no different from the existing ad hoc mechanisms that poured hundreds of
billions of dollars into South-east Asia, Russia and Latin America from 1995.
Moreover, no changes could reasonably be anticipated in the corresponding
credit ‘conditionality’ – i.e. austerity as the basis for macroeconomic policy
– required by Washington. In sum, because they reward the speculators and
creditors – while the bulk of the pain was displaced onto low- and middle-
income emerging-market citizens (especially vulnerable ones like women,
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 16
children, the elderly and the disabled) – the bailouts simply would not
prevent the conditions that caused the crises from re-emerging.16
Ebbs and flows of foreign direct investment17

As a response to financial crisis, the single orthodox theoretical proposition
that bears consideration, finally, is that transnational corporations (TNCs)
invest increasing amounts of fixed capital which, in turn, helps to undergird
the speculative financial capital by ensuring a more sustained inflow of
long-term foreign investment. And indeed there has been a large upsurge in
foreign direct investment (FDI) since the 1980s. The point, however, is to
consider it critically.
We might start with the push factors, recalling the ANC Alliance argu-
ment given at the beginning of this chapter that ‘It is precisely declining
profitability in the most advanced economies that has spurred the last quar-
ter of a century of intensified globalization’. From levels in the $50–$100
billion range from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s (as profits stagnated at
post-war lows in the major industrialised countries), there was a huge boom
once IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) pressure
succeeded in destroying local sovereignty and crashing many local curren-
cies. Overseas investments by TNCs skyrocketed to $865 billion by 1999,
getting fire-sale prices on existing assets in East Asia at the end of the
century thanks to that region’s financial collapse. From 1990 to 1999, global
FDI rose by 314%, compared to an increase in world trade of 65% and
world gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 40%.
However, FDI trends exemplified the uneven development of global
capitalist activity. Just ten major developed countries account for 70% of
FDI activity (Japan, Belgium/Luxembourg, Ireland, Canada, Germany, the
Netherlands, France, Sweden, Britain and the United States). Still, a grow-
ing share of FDI can be found in the largest emerging markets, especially
China, East Asia and the large Latin American countries. All developing
countries attracted annual FDI flows of $175 billion during 1997–8 and
$200 billion in 1999, up from just $25 billion in 1990. During the 1990s,
annual loans by commercial banks rose from $20 billion to $100 billion in
1997, but dropped back down to $20 billion in 1999; portfolio investment
rose from $5 billion to $50 billion in 1996, but fell to $25 billion in 1999;
and official development assistance stayed relatively stagnant at around
$50 billion over the period. So by 1999, FDI represented 67% of all North-
South flows of resources.
Meanwhile, Africa’s share of FDI fell from 25% of all TNC investments
during the 1970s to less than 5% during the late 1990s. And even the tiny
amounts of FDI in Sub-Saharan Africa in recent years can be attributed in
large part to investments by oil companies in Angola ($1.8 billion in 1999)
and Nigeria ($1.4 billion). In these cases, massive corruption and internal
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 17
strife did not deter TNCs, even although these conditions were regularly
highlighted and condemned by Transparency International (TI) and inter-
national agencies.
The only substantive FDI flows into Sub-Saharan Africa unrelated to
extractive minerals by 1999 were into South Africa ($1.4 billion). But on a
relative basis, that amounted to just $10 per $1 000 of GDP in South Africa,
which was the same as Zimbabwe. As I will discuss below, South Africa’s
own outflows of FDI, from firms with their headquarters in SA, exceeded
inflows, even before the repatriation of dividends/profits and the payments
of patent/royalty fees. Worse, statistics have never picked up the durable
problem of transfer pricing, whereby foreign investors steal money from
developing countries by falsely invoicing inputs drawn from abroad (e.g.
mining firms in South Africa through their offices in Switzerland). In any
event, the bulk of FDI into South Africa was based on mergers and acqui-
sitions, the most important of which was the partial privatisation of Telkom,
a critique of which I will offer in Chapter six. Many thousands of jobs were
lost in the process, and the transfer of inappropriate technology made
South Africa all the more dependent and vulnerable. In all of this, FDI did
not undergird the speculative financial flows with value-producing invest-
ments, but instead exacerbated them.
More evidence of the damage done not only by hot-money speculation
and FDI, but more generally by global economic volatility and stagnation,
can be seen by dissecting the central processes behind Africa’s crisis. There
are internal and external features to consider, and the latter include trade
and financial markets, and neo-liberalism’s failures.
3. The African crisis continues

To relate the global crisis to Africa’s sustained socio-economic oppression
entails exploration of the key mechanisms of domination, including trade
and debt. But it is important first to forthrightly address the broader
dynamic of Africa’s apparent trajectory of self-destruction.
The starting point is, necessarily, the grounding in development politics
gained by communities, women, youth, workforces and churches on the
one hand, and on the other, by nationalist political parties that still rule or
strongly influence most African states (albeit sometimes merely as the
media for the transmission of Washington-think). The contemporary
context is the brutal socio-economic, gender, ecological, youth, public-
health and disability crises that rack Africa.
The rise and fall of nationalism

Widespread Afro-pessimism – exemplified by banal, victim-blaming
argumentation in an issue of The Economist, which entitled a cover story in
mid-2000 ‘The Hopeless Continent’18 – should not allow the fading from
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 18
memory of 1950s–90s struggles for national/racial/social justice. For in

virtually all the anti-colonial projects of Southern Africa, and indeed the
rest of the continent, could be found rhetorics of human dignity and prom-
ises that a fully fledged citizenship would be provided at independence.
There was recognition of the simultaneous need to capture the state and
nurture participatory democracy, of socialist (or, at the very least, Uhuru)
development ideals, of ending racial (and sometimes gender) oppression
and of the harmonious relations between states and civil societies that
would make these visions a reality. The late Claude Ake summarised the
discourse as follows:
The language of the nationalist movement was the language of democracy, as
is clear from: I Speak of Freedom (Nyerere), Without Bitterness (Orizu),
Facing Mount Kenya (Kenyatta), Not Yet Uhuru (Odinga), Freedom and
Development (Nyerere), African Socialism (Senghor), and The Wretched of
the Earth (Fanon). It denounced the violation of dignity of the colonised, the
denial of basic rights, the political disenfranchisement of the colonised, racial
discrimination, lack of equal opportunity and equal access, and economic
exploitation of the colonised. The people were mobilised according to these
grievances and expectations of a more democratic dispensation.19
Of course, things went badly wrong in virtually all cases, and by the early
1980s, as crisis and repression set in, the subcontinent’s few sites of devel-
opmental hope were in Southern Africa, especially Mozambique and
Zimbabwe, and, from 1994, South Africa. In some ways, the malgovernance
that emerged across Africa pointed to larger political/economic processes
and geopolitical alignments associated with the Cold War – whose African
battlegrounds were often extremely hot – and the simultaneous slowdown
in economic growth – and hence demand for raw materials – in Northern
and Eastern industrial countries. These factors culminated in a global polit-
ical/economic environment that, during the last two decades of the
20th century, was simply not conducive to African development.
There are internal and external reasons for the problems Sub-Saharan
Africa has suffered for the past quarter of a century. Socio-economically,
standards of living fell to 1950s levels in many countries. And militarily,
many countries witnessed extraordinary social, civil and regional conflicts,
ranging from genocide to attempted coups, during the 1980s–90s: Angola,
Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau,
Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger,
Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan,
Togo, Uganda, Western Sahara and Zambia.
The internal reasons for Africa’s late-20th-century economic problems
vary, but included inherited colonial legacies (including the illogicality of
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 19
many borders) and the transition from colonialism to undemocratic and

often corrupt, militarised, neo-colonial regimes. Many had adopted
economic strategies that benefited a few urban elites at the expense of peas-
ants, especially women producers, workers and even local manufacturers.
The continent’s civil wars and adverse climatic conditions (droughts and
floods) are increasingly identified with structural political/economic prob-
lems, ranging from post-Cold War geopolitical fragility to global warming.
But domestic economic policies, especially in settler-colonial societies,
dating to World War II – when global linkages were at their weakest – were
often inappropriate. The inward-looking import-substitution industrialisa-
tion (ISI) strategy typically did not foster linkages between mass consump-
tion and mass production (which would have led to greater balance and
sustainability), but rather was aimed at establishing local production of
luxury goods for a small, wealthy elite, especially in South Africa and
Zimbabwe, the economies with the most advanced manufacturing sectors.
Ironically, as specialisation increased, the ISI approach ultimately made
these countries even more dependent on external sources of sophisticated
machinery, parts and raw materials than they had been earlier. Subsequent
export-led growth strategies were typically promoted as a central compo-
nent of ‘macroeconomic reforms’ imposed on countries by lenders and
Northern governments, notwithstanding the declining, glutted character of
world markets associated with the main goods produced in Southern
Africa.
In virtually no cases, in Africa or elsewhere, were power relations optimal
to develop an economy to meet the basic needs of all a country’s citizens,
even though such a strategy would have provided far greater ‘multipliers’
(economic spin-offs) than multinational corporate investments or the pres-
tige projects of African post-colonial rulers. Aside from Cold War military
and political interference, there were, moreover, two main external factors
associated with Africa’s economic crisis: falling international commodity
prices since the mid-1970s and rising real interest rates since 1979 in a
context of massive external debt.
Trade traps
In international markets, Africa has suffered unfair terms of trade (i.e. the
difference between prices paid for exports in relation to prices paid for
imports) since the peak of demand for its raw materials and before synthetic
substitutes were invented during World War II. From the mid-1970s, terms
of trade worsened, in part because of export-oriented policies, discussed
below, which most African countries were compelled to adopt once they
experienced a debt crisis.
The decline in the price index for the main (non-fuel) commodities
dropped especially dramatically from 1977 to 1982, while the export prices
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 20
of developed countries increased steadily. During the 1982–90 global expan-

sion, the terms of trade of Third World countries still fell markedly, by 4%
per year. Much of the decline was due to the drop in oil prices that began in
earnest in 1986, but non-oil-producing Third World countries also witnessed
a negative 1.5% annual deterioration in the prices of their exports relative to
imports. This trend continued after the 1990–2 global recession, leaving
1998 commodity prices at their lowest levels since the Great Depression.20
In broader historical terms, the prices of primary commodities other than
fuels have risen and fallen according to a deeper rhythm. Exporters of
primary commodities, for example, have fared particularly badly when finan-
ciers have been most powerful. The cycle typically includes falling commod-
ity prices, rising foreign debt, dramatic increases in interest rates, a desperate
intensification of exports which lowers prices yet further, and bankruptcy.
From around 1973, this process impoverished the non-industrialised Third
World, with occasional, erratic exceptions in oil-producing regions.
For Africa, the trend of declining terms of trade was especially devastat-
ing because of the continent’s extraordinary dependence upon a few export
commodities. The following countries suffer from reliance upon a single
product for at least 75% of their export earnings: Angola, Botswana,
Burundi, Congo, Gabon, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda and
Zambia. The only countries that diversified their exports, so making at least
25% of their export earnings from more than four products, are the
Gambia, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
Generally, across Africa, four or fewer products make up three-quarters of
export revenues. More than three-quarters of all Africa’s trade is with devel-
oped countries.
Export-led growth strategies adopted since the 1970s by virtually all
Third World countries meant that Africa’s market share of world commod-
ity prices also shrank drastically. In the 1970s and 1980s alone, the African
market share of coca fell from 75% to 58%, of palm oil from 58% to 18%,
of sisal from 48% to 36%, of coffee from 35% to 20%, of crude petroleum
from 15% to 8%, of cotton from 12% to 7%, and of copper from 10% to
6%.21 The most far-ranging study of terms of trade (by Elbadawi and
Ndulu) put the income loss during the 1970s and 1980s at nearly 4% of
GDP, about twice as high as that of other countries.22 Virtually no African
economies made the necessary switch from reliance on primary export
commodities. One reason was that state marketing boards were mandated
to conduct trade at extremely low prices, even at a loss, simply to acquire
the foreign currency needed to service large debts.
Debt crisis
Rising debt is the second formidable external aspect of economic crisis in
Africa (Chapter 3 includes a lengthier discussion of its causes and conse-
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 21
quences in Southern Africa). The continent was drawn into a debt trap in
ways that in retrospect appear entirely unjustified. The two most obvious
problems were the use to which borrowed money was put, and the variable
rate at which most foreign debt was contracted during the 1970s. While
some of the debt originated in a need to cope with the increase in global oil
prices in 1973, much of the rest of the borrowed hard currency was unnec-
essary, destined for white-elephant projects, for arms expenditure and for
the import of luxury goods. The banks that lent the money were obviously
at fault for ‘loan-pushing’. Some of the money was understood to be lining
the pockets of corrupt elites, but international banks, the IMF and World
Bank ignored the moral implications of lending to a Mobutu, a Banda or a
Botha.
Moreover, during the initial rise in African foreign debt during most of
the 1970s, the interest rates on dollar-denominated loans were negative in
real terms (i.e. once inflation was discounted, it cost less to repay the loans
than they were initially worth). Then, in 1979, the interest payments
suddenly increased dramatically when the US Federal Reserve implemented
a ‘monetarist’ – i.e. high-interest-rate – policy. From negative rates in the
1970s, inflation-adjusted interest rates averaged 2% above the average
annual growth of the world economy (which was 3%) during the 1980s. A
related issue was the ‘collateral’ – i.e. security – for such loans. Such security
was thought not to be an issue, since sovereign countries in the post-war era
were not supposed to default. To this end, the IMF was used during the first
part of the 1980s as a vehicle for ensuring that African countries repaid loans
from Northern commercial banks, in exchange for the IMF gaining the
power over those countries to impose austere macroeconomic policies
which emphasised liberalisation, export orientation and an end to social
subsidies.
The World Bank also stepped in, expanding beyond individual project
and sector loans so as to finance fully fledged structural adjustment. All of
this represented little more than a bailout by Northern taxpayers of
Northern commercial banks through the IMF and World Bank. But incom-
ing funds continued to decline, and, by 1984, net financial-resource trans-
fers to the Third World were negative for the first time, as countries spent
more on interest payments than they gained in new loans. By the end of the
decade, the net South–North transfer had reached $50 billion a year, which
reflected the success of financiers in shifting the repayment burden not only
to Northern taxpayers but also to Third World citizens.
As a result, the Third World debt crisis was considered ‘solved’ by the
early 1990s, as most Northern banks had by then either received their Third
World loan money back through IMF/World Bank bailouts; or sold the bad
loans at a discount on ‘secondary markets’ of sovereign debt; or, quite
commonly, declared the loans as unrepayable for local tax purposes but
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 22
continued to demand repayment by Third World countries. But effectively

the debt crisis no longer threatened the Northern banks (see Chapter three
for more details).
However, in contrast, developing countries found that by 1997 they still
had more than $2 trillion in foreign debt to repay (up from $1.3 trillion
during the early 1980s, when the debt crisis broke out, and $1.4 trillion in
1990). In 1997, the debtor countries paid the North $270 billion in debt
service, up from $160 billion in 1990. In net terms, African countries paid
$162 billion more than they received in new loans in 1997, up from
$60 billion in 1990.23
Beginning with Mexico in 1982, the untenable character of the debt
caused a series of Third World defaults. Sometimes the defaults were
delayed by virtue of the IMF and World Bank arranging an urgent credit
for the purpose of paying debts coming due. Occasionally, governments
stood up to international pressure by declaring a partial repayment mora-
torium. This attracted enormous political pressure, as in the cases of
Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda, Brazil following its temporary default in
1987, Peru under the populist Alain Garcia and Nicaragua under the
Sandinistas. (South Africa in 1985–7 may be the most successful counter-
example, when Pretoria successfully negotiated a repayment ‘standstill’
with Northern banks.)
The debt is particularly onerous for the poorest African countries, which
defaulted en masse during the early 1980s, but were simply given new loans
to pay off old loans. As a result, although between 1984 and 1996 the
lowest-income African countries paid $1.5 billion in repayments – a sum
1.5 times greater than the amount owed in 1980, as a result of compounded
interest payments – they still owe far more today. Repayment averaged 16%
of the spending of African governments during the 1980s, as compared to
12% on education, 10% on defence and 4% on health.
There is convincing documentation that women and vulnerable children,
the elderly and disabled people are the main victims of debt repayment
pressure, as they are expected to survive with less social subsidy, with more
pressure on the fabric of the family during economic crisis, and with
HIV/AIDS closely correlated to structural adjustment. The economic poli-
cies imposed on Southern African countries as a result of their trade and
debt vulnerabilities are therefore worth yet more consideration.
Africa ‘reforms’ for Washington’s benefit

Based on the 1981 Berg Report, most of the macroeconomic reforms that
IMF and World Bank teams insisted African countries pursue have been
relatively uniform. The programmes, subsequently known as the
‘Washington Consensus’, nearly always involve the following components,
most of which are extremely detrimental to state social policies:
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 23
government budget cuts, increases in user fees for public services, and
privatisation of state enterprises (including even municipal services);
the lifting of price controls, subsidies and any other distortions of
market forces;
the liberalisation of currency controls and currency devaluation;
higher interest rates and deregulation of local finance;
the removal of import barriers (trade tariffs and quotas); and
an emphasis on the promotion of exports, above all other economic
priorities.
The effects of these policies have been quite consistent. Budget cuts
depressed the effective demand of African economies, leading to declining
growth. Often the alleged ‘crowding out’ of productive investment by
government spending was not actually the reason for lack of investment, so
the budget cuts were not compensated for by private-sector growth. The
implementation of privatisation often did not distinguish which state enter-
prises may have been strategic in nature, was too often accompanied by
corruption, and often suffered from the foreign takeover of domestic indus-
try with scant regard for maintaining local employment or production levels
(the incentive for this takeover was sometimes simply gaining access to
markets).
Moreover, there were no attempts by IMF and World Bank economists
to determine how state agencies could supply services that enhanced
‘public goods’ and merit goods. For example, the positive effects of water
supply on public health, environmental protection, local economic activity
and gender equality were never calculated. In this way, all state services
were reduced to mere commodities, requiring of their recipients full cost-
recovery through the elimination of subsidies.
A poignant example is water, which the World Bank has been pushing
many municipal governments in Africa to privatise. In a context in which
public-good effects of water supply were not factored into a World Bank-
designed national infrastructure policy, South Africa faced an outbreak of
cholera in August 2000 that led to scores of deaths and tens of thousands
of infections, costing tens of millions of rands, because low-income people
were not able to pay full cost-recovery on systems that then either broke
down or suffered cut-offs by municipal officials (saving a few tens of thou-
sands of rands). At the same time, the World Bank was circulating a docu-
ment entitled Sourcebook on Community Driven Development in the
African Region, which warned other World Bank staff that ‘work is still
needed with political leaders in some national governments to move away
from the concept of free water for all’. As for project work on water, these
staff were instructed to ‘Ensure 100% recovery of operation and mainte-
nance costs’.24
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 24
Another central reason for declining economic growth under structural

adjustment was the tendency for interest rates to jump to very high levels
once financial controls were released, or when a foreign-currency crisis
emerged. Hardest hit were often small businesses. Likewise, the lifting of
price controls along with foreign-currency liberalisation and currency
devaluation often created a generalised inflationary tendency, accompany-
ing a surge of imports of luxury goods. While this made more goods
available, especially in elite urban shops, they were often so far out of range
of most consumers that the benefits of liberalisation never trickled down.
The emphasis on liberalising imports and promoting exports did virtually
nothing to improve the balance of trade, and in fact, in most cases, liberali-
sation caused trade surpluses to rapidly become deficits. Austerity usually
killed formal-sector jobs, deindustrialised weak manufacturing sectors,
rewarded the financial sector, and in the process worsened social inequality.
At the end of the 1990s, the continent recorded somewhat higher growth, off
a very low base in some countries. Yet such growth self-evidently failed to
trickle down to most people, as poverty worsened and inequality rose
sharply. And already meagre state services simply collapsed in many parts of
the continent.
Structural adjustment not only worsened economic conditions. It never
grappled with the real causes of the disempowerment of the mass of
producers. Without being ‘Afro-pessimistic’ by ‘reducing the past to a one-
dimensional reality … [through] a roots of crisis literature’, Mahmood
Mamdani nevertheless argues that much of Africa’s local-level state admin-
istration in rural settings amounted to ‘decentralised despotism’, even prior
to the crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Virtually all attempts to reform colo-
nial-era administration and its equivalent ethnic-based systems failed. Even
in the best case, Museveni’s Uganda, where local-level power relations
inherited from centralised despotic rule had to be thoroughly broken, there
remained a ‘bifurcated’ duality of power between a centrally located
modern state (sometimes directly responsible for urban order in primate
capital cities) and a ‘tribal authority which dispensed customary law to
those living within the territory of the tribe’.25 With this observation,
Mamdani addresses global-national-local processes:
In the absence of democratisation, development became a top-down
agenda enforced on the peasantry. Without thorough-going democratisa-
tion, there could be no development of a home market. The latter failure
opened wide what was a crevice at Independence. With every downturn in
the international economy, the crevice turned into an opportunity for an
externally defined structural adjustment that combined a narrowly defined
programme of privatisation with a broadly defined programme of global-
ization.26
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 25
Futile Washington spin control

It was soon evident that neo-liberal medicine was killing the African
patient. By the late 1980s, after about a decade’s experience in approxi-
mately three dozen African countries, critics more forcefully questioned
macroeconomic reform. A debate raged about whether two World Bank
reports (Africa’s Adjustment and Growth in the 1980s and Sub-Saharan
Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, both published in 1989)
adequately explained the continent’s dramatic declines in standards of
living, terms of trade and ability to service debt. There was great doubt
about the truth of a World Bank claim that during the late 1980s countries
which adopted orthodox macroeconomic reforms grew more quickly.
Arguing in favour of structural adjustment, the World Bank was joined
by many African leaders who probably felt they had no other choice in the
matter. Their adoption of structural adjustment as (cynically named) ‘home-
grown’ programmes can only be understood against the need the World
Bank expressed, by the late 1980s, for legitimacy.27 In the same spirit, the
World Bank and its allies at the US Agency for International Development
even argued, for a brief period in 1994, that structural adjustment was not
harmful to the poor:
In African countries that have undertaken some reforms and achieved some
increase in growth, the majority of the poor are probably better off and almost
certainly no worse off. The poor are mostly rural, and as producers, they tend
to benefit from agricultural, trade and exchange rate reforms and from the
demonopolisation of important commercial activities. As consumers, both the
urban and the rural poor tend to be hurt by rising food prices. But adjustment
measures have seldom had a major impact on food prices in either the open
market or the parallel market, which supplies most of the poor.28
A variety of rebuttals and corrections of adjustment/poverty data
followed.29 For notwithstanding social programmes sometimes added so as
to mitigate the effects of structural adjustment, the adverse effects were
indeed concentrated on the poorest, least-organised groups in society.
Imposition of user fees, especially, led to a decline in utilisation rates for
health and educational services, which in turn substantially reduced
‘human capital formation’, with women suffering disproportionately.
Notwithstanding the attraction of ‘sustainable development’ concepts –
particularly the need to ‘internalise externalities’30 (i.e. draw in other factors
left out in market exchanges, such as pollution) – the rhetoric to this end
was rarely matched by action. Virtually no attempts were made by the IMF,
World Bank donors or domestic policy-makers to determine how state
agencies could supply services that enhanced positive externalities. The
effects of water supply on public health, environmental protection, local
economic activity and gender equality were the subject of some World Bank
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 26
research (e.g. in the World Bank World Development Report: Infrastructure

for Development in 1994). But, as was noted above, public services were
often reduced to mere commodities, requiring of consumers payment to
equate with full cost-recovery, resulting in the elimination of cross-subsidies
(rising block tariffs and lifeline supplies) that would favour the poor. (The
point, typically, was to attract private investors in joint ventures, outsourc-
ing or outright privatisation of state services, as World Bank personnel
readily admitted.)31 To the extent that social subsidies were still permitted,
they were targeted through ‘means-testing’ in an ineffectual manner. Nearly
all social programmes introduced to mitigate adjustment performed poorly.32
Evidence has grown of the social cost of the orthodox ‘neo-liberal’ (free-
market) development plan. In three Southern African countries (Malawi,
Zambia and Zimbabwe), per capita daily protein consumption, for exam-
ple, fell 20–25% during the period 1970–95. In the health sector, condi-
tions across the whole of the Southern African Development Community
(SADC) deteriorated during the mid-1990s to levels amongst the world’s
worst for under-five mortality (140 per 1 000 children); maternal mortality
(888 per 100 000 live births); life expectancy (52); malnutrition (20% of
children under five underweight, and 36% suffering stunting); measles
immunisation (just 68% of one-year-olds); contraceptive use (just 28% of
women of 15–45 years of age); and the incidence of such deadly diseases as
malaria (5 550 per 100 000 people), tuberculosis (149 per 100 000 people),
and HIV/AIDS (30 AIDS cases per 100 000 people and a 12% prevalence
for adults under 49 years of age in 1995, worsening dramatically by the end
of the decade as the pandemic spread through South Africa).33
While social suffering worsened, the capacity of nation states to increase
health and education expenditures declined. Given that social and
economic policy-making for Third World countries was increasingly shifted
from national capitals to Washington, on behalf of the financial markets, it
is perhaps not surprising that an entire generation of nationalist leaders
diverted course from populist mandates towards implementing ineffectual
structural adjustment programmes (which in turn generally destroyed their
popularity). So too did once-‘communist’ governments in Mozambique and
Angola endorse a crude material-oriented and export-led strategy. This was
a global problem, affecting all ex-communist, social-democratic and labour
parties virtually everywhere. But in Sub-Saharan Africa, the stripping away
of national sovereignty was most pronounced, leading in some cases in the
Horn and in West Africa, to the collapse of state structures, of legal frame-
works, of monetary systems and of any semblance of order.
The limits of Washington’s line

Naturally, many Africans firmly resisted structural adjustment, in circum-
stances ranging from ‘IMF riots’ in urban shanty towns, to more obscure,
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 27
often religious-based, ‘silent revolutions’ through barter and other exit

options in rural areas, to growing linkages being made between human
rights violations and debt social movements (even middle-class church
congregations), to formal critiques by an ever-smaller, beleaguered group of
African intellectuals and progressive technical officials.
For example, the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa, led
by Adebayo Adedeji, had offered two important rebuttals by the time struc-
tural adjustment became generalised, during the late 1980s: Statistics and
Policies: ECA Preliminary Observations on the World Bank Report and the
African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes (AAF-
SAP). Further critiques emerged from case studies by independent
observers, as well as in social statistics and reports from the UN Conference
on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN Children’s Emergency
Relief Fund (UNICEF)and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).
Remember that the economic problems discussed above were, at root,
premised on the slowdown in economic growth in the major industrial
countries beginning during the 1970s. Therefore the power of finance over
the Third World during the 1980s represented not so much a true ‘solution’
in terms of more open trade and investment prospects (and hence higher
TNC profits and lower global wages than would have been the case other-
wise), but rather a deepening of the problem, as the limits of the strategy of
draining the Third World were felt by even the most powerful of the
world’s banks. Indeed, the Third World debt crisis contributed significantly
to international financial turmoil.
Yet unlike the 1930s, the Northern creditors have not yet suffered the
kind of generalised financial collapse that gave so many other countries the
ability to default, without facing serious political ramifications. (Those
earlier creditors were mainly individual bondholders, not centralised,
powerful commercial banks and Washington financial institutions.)
Instead, the debt has been rolled over and meagre amounts of ‘debt relief’
have been ladled out to countries which continue to play by Washington’s
rules.
Given the obscene inequality and suffering associated with declining
terms of trade, rising debt and structural adjustment programmes, some
African countries were chosen by the IMF and World Bank as beneficiaries
of the ‘Highly-Indebted Poor Country’ (HIPC) initiative. Most importantly,
HIPC allows merely a write-off of unserviceable debt, which no one ever
expects the poorest countries to repay. (Chapter 3 considers the
Mozambique case, a sham that strengthened Washington’s grip around
Maputo’s throat.)
HIPC is now widely condemned for merely prolonging Africa’s debt
misery. There is emerging, both from within Africa and from Northern
(and other Southern) solidarity activists, a vibrant social movement whose
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 28
objective is the full cancellation of Third World debt by next year. The
movement – ‘Jubilee 2000’ (named after a statement in the Old
Testament’s Leviticus that debts should be periodically cleared to give
debtors a chance to recover) – played an effective role in bringing the issue
to international public attention. Though right-wing ‘allies’ – the Pope and
economist Jeffrey Sachs – endorsed a weak version of the Jubilee call, a
more durable ‘Jubilee South’ movement grew, holding summits in
Johannesburg in late 1999 and Senegal a year later.34
The tradeoff that the Jubilee movement posits is simple. Sub-Saharan
Africa paid the developed world $13.4 billion to service foreign debt in
1996, in part by borrowing $9.5 billion in new funds and using $2.6 billion
of aid payments from Northern countries. By way of contrast, the cost of
meeting basic goals in Africa for universal healthcare, nutrition, education
and family planning is estimated at about $9 billion a year. This kind of
money will not become available until the debt is cleared; but Africa’s many
leaders allied to Washington will never challenge the Washington-imposed
status quo of power relations on their own.
Consider the assessment by Southern Africa’s main debt negotiator
during the 1980s, Zimbabwean finance minister Bernard Chidzero,
discussing the IMF/World Bank annual meeting in 1989 at which he
chaired the misnamed ‘Joint Ministerial Committee on the Transfer of Real
Resources to Developing Countries’: ‘Curiously enough, debt was not the
central issue. It was at the back of everyone’s mind. But those who are
primarily concerned with the debt issue have been saying: “Look, the game
is being played. Don’t upset the applecart too much”.’35
The most important problem that arises from these experiences is
whether Africans can muster a combination of robust democratic activism,
protest around socio-economic grievances, technical critiques and propos-
als, counterhegemonic local-level development strategies and national-
policy advocacy. I will take this subject up again in Chapter eleven. First,
however, it is useful to change the focus from global and continental issues,
to regional and national issues (Chapters two to four), and explore the
extent to which the South African state is preparing a challenge to the
system (Part two), using the HIV/AIDS case as an example (Part three),
before moving on to a discussion of international activism (Part four).
Notes
1 For the full reference, see endnote 2, below. I provide a context for understanding
this document in Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition, London, Pluto Press and
Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, Chapter 6. In essence, the radical tone
reflected not only the deteriorating objective conditions of the country, but also,
subjectively, the need for rhetorical turns of phrase that would allow the previously
spurned left wing of the Tripartite Alliance back into the ‘National Liberation
Movement’ fold prior to the 1999 national election.
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 29
2 ANC Alliance (1998), ‘The Global Economic Crisis and its Implications for South
Africa’, ANC Alliance discussion document, October, Johannesburg, reprinted in
The African Communist, 4th quarter.
3 Marx, K. (1967 edn) Capital, New York, International Publishers, vol. 1, parts 3 & 4.
4 See especially Harvey, D. (ed.) (1999), Limits to Capital, London, Verso, for the
underlying theory of crisis formation and spatio-temporal displacement through the
financial and commercial circuits of capital. Robert Brenner’s more recent (2001)
statement of the evidence is based on careful study of intensified inter-core-capital-
ist competition (see Turbulence in the World Economy, London, Verso). Other
diverse, although at this level perhaps not irreconcilable, analyses of the 1970s–80s
stage of overaccumulation include Clarke, S. (1988), Keynesianism, Monetarism and
the Crisis of the State, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, pp. 279–360; Harvey, D. (1989), The
Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, pp. 180–97; Mandel, E.
(1989), ‘Theories of Crisis: An Explanation of the 1974–82 Cycle’, in M. Gottdiener
and N. Komninos (eds), Capitalist Development and Crisis Theory: Accumulation,
Regulation and Spatial Restructuring, London, Macmillan, pp. 30–58; Shutt, H.
(1999), The Trouble with Capitalism, London, Zed, pp. 34–45; and Biel, R. (2000),
The New Imperialism, London, Zed, pp. 131–89.
5 Arrighi, G. (1994), The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of
Our Times, London, Verso.
6 I expand on this argument in a case study: Bond, P. (1998), Uneven Zimbabwe: A
Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment, Trenton, Africa World Press.
Further theory can be found in Bond, P. (1999), the entries entitled ‘Uneven
Development’ and ‘Finance Capital’ in P. O’Hara (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Political
Economy, London, Routledge.
7 Henwood, D. (ed.) (1998), Wall Street, London, Verso.
8 Bank for International Settlements (1999), Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange
and Derivative Market Activity 1998, Basle.
9 Standard Chartered Bank (1999), Annual Report 1998, London, p. 7.
10 Henwood, op. cit., pp. 324–7.
11 These US data and others below are from Henwood, op. cit., pp. 73–7 and 59.
12 Soros, G. (1998), The Crisis of Global Capitalism: The Open Society Endangered,
New York, Public Affairs.
13 Soros, G. (1997), ‘Avoiding a Global Breakdown’, Financial Times, 31 December
1997.
14 Bhagwati, J. (1998), ‘The Capital Myth: The Difference between Trade in Widgets
and Trade in Dollars’, Foreign Affairs, 77(3).
15 Camdessus, M. (1999), ‘Capital Flows, Crises and the Private Sector’, remarks to the
Institute of International Bankers, Washington, DC, 1 March, p. 9.
16 This latter point is made by Stiglitz, J. (1998), ‘Towards a New Paradigm for
Development: Strategies, Policies, and Processes’, Prebisch Lecture, UN
Conference on Trade and Development, Geneva, 19 October.
17 Statistics below come from UNCTAD (2000), World Investment Report, Geneva,
and Business Map (whose database often fails to distinguish between intended and
actual investments). Typically, an investment by a non-domestic source is formally
considered to be ‘foreign direct investment’ if the foreign ownership stake in a
venture is at least 10% and if there is a tangible influence on management of that
venture. This kind of subjectivity that even a major UN agency must resort to in its
measurement of FDI is obviously a major problem. Moreover, in part because of
UNCTAD’s strong ideological tilt towards neo-liberalism during the late 1990s
(under the presidency of South Africa’s trade and industry minister, Alec Erwin), the
Chapter 1 7/22/03 6:27 pm Page 30
figures below should be treated with extreme caution. To illustrate, UNCTAD meas-
ured $1.8 billion of FDI in Angola, while Business Map measured $0 in the SADC
energy and oil sector in the same year.
18 The subtitle (13 May 2000) explained, ‘Africa’s biggest problems stem from its pres-
ent leaders. But they were created by African society and history’.
19 Ake, C. (2000), The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa, Dakar, Codesria, p. 46.
20 Barratt-Brown, M. and Tiffen, P. (1992), Short Changed: Africa and World Trade,
London, Pluto Press, p. 3.
21 UNCTAD (1991), Commodity Yearbook, Geneva.
22 Elbadawi, A. and Ndulu, B. (1996), ‘Long-run Development and Sustainable
Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in M. Lundahl and B. Ndulu (eds), New Directions
in Development Economics: Growth, Environmental Concerns and Governments in
the 1990s, London, Routledge.
23 Jubilee 2000 (1997), ‘Free Africa of Debt’, London.
24 World Bank (2000), Sourcebook on Community Driven Development in the Africa
Region: Community Action Programs, Africa Region, Washington, DC, 17 March
(signatories: Calisto Madavo and Jean-Louis Sarbib), Annex 2.
25 Mamdani, M. (1996), Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of
Late Colonialism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 111.
26 Ibid, p. 287.
27 This was the obvious function of the key paper on this topic by former South
African Communist Party activist Geoffrey Lamb, who by the 1980s became influ-
ential in the World Bank. At one point he warned that World Bank ‘support for
technocratic policy elites’ should not be tempered by plausible deniability (on their
part), so as to ‘not too drastically compromise the recipients’ influence’. See Lamb,
G. (1987), ‘Managing Economic Policy Change: Institutional Dimensions’, Wash-
ington, DC, World Bank, p. 10.
28 World Bank (1994), Adjustment in Africa: Reforms, Results and the Road Ahead,
New York, Oxford University Press, p. 7.
29 For contrary evidence of the effects of adjustment on the rural poor, see, amongst
others, Ali, A. (1998), ‘Structural Adjustment and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa’,
in T. Mkandawire and C. Soludo (eds), African Perspectives on Structural Adjust-
ment, Ottawa, IDRC; and Costello, A., Watson, F. and Woodward, D. (1994),
Human Face or Human Facade? Adjustment and the Health of Mothers and Children,
London, Centre for International Child Health.
30 See, for example, World Bank (1994), World Development Report 1994: Infra-
structure for Development, Washington, World Bank.
31 The debate is covered in Bond, P. (2000), Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal: Essays
on South Africa’s New Urban Crisis, Trenton, Africa World Press, Chapters 3–4.
32 Mkandawire, T. and Soludo, C. (1999), Our Continent, Our Future, Ottawa, IDRC,
Trenton, Africa World Press and London, James Currey, pp. 74–5.
33 Southern African Political Economic Series (1998), SADC Regional Human
Development Report, Harare.
34 Links to Jubilee South can be found at http://aidc.org.za.
35 Southern African Economist, November 1989.
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 31
CHAPTER TWO
Southern African socio-economic conflict

(with Darlene Miller and Greg Ruiters)
1. Introduction
Southern Africa is probably the world’s most extreme site of uneven
capitalist development.1 Inequality within and between the region’s
countries is severe, with race and gender domination largely undisturbed by
the post-colonial experience, with the environment taking enormous strain,
and with South Africa – and its 40 million of the region’s 102 million
citizens – responsible for $130 billion of Southern Africa’s $160 billion
formal-sector economic output in 1998.
It is logical to anticipate, as well, an uneven, fragmented evolution of
working-class power and political strategy, given the area’s different modes
of class struggle, levels of consciousness, organisational capacity, militancy,
and relations with political parties and other social forces. Yet as we shall
see here and in Chapter eleven, developments in one country act as major
reference points for others. And yet while Southern Africa’s rich radical
traditions – including once-avowed ‘Marxist-Leninist’ governments in
Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola, mass-movements and powerful
unions – owe much to revolutionary socialism and nationalism, this has not
so far given rise to an explicit regional class project.
The question that ultimately has to be posed, then, is whether a coherent,
cross-border vision can emerge to counteract the unevenness. Will ‘global-
isation’ provide an opportunity for this, through rising international work-
ing-class consciousness in reaction to the multinational corporate agenda?
Might the catalyst be a new round of parasitic South African corporate
investment in the region? Or will fragmentation prevail, as was already
reflected in the upsurge in South African working-class xenophobia in the
late 1990s?
To address these strategic political problems, as I have attempted to do
in Part four of this book, requires concrete, historical investigations linking
particular situations to general trends. Certain aspects of working-class
experience are, of course, regionally universal or at least comparable, in
part reflecting the importance and homogenising effect of cross-border
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 32
migrant labour. The counterpart of the current regeneration of rural-urban

linkages caused by the desperation of many unemployed workers –
including more than a million laid off during the 1990s – is the rural drift
to rapidly growing urban slums.
Also common to all these countries are issues of perpetual concern to
workers: the HIV/AIDS pandemic; the prevalence of child labour; ongoing
farm-labour/tenant exploitation; low skills levels and inadequate training;
rising privatisation pressures and controversies over other public-sector
restructuring measures; periodic refugee inflows and debates over immi-
gration policy; the emerging Export-Processing Zone threat to occupa-
tional safety, health and wages (based on prototypes in Botswana, Lesotho
and Swaziland); and mass poverty. These broader social concerns, and
other reflections of daily struggle, benefit little from traditional ‘corporatist’
(i.e. big government + big business + big labour) relationships still favoured
by some of the region’s union leaders.
Yet the concentration and centralisation of Southern African capital –
from a geographical base in Johannesburg – is providing the whole region’s
workers with opportunities to challenge the same employers through cross-
border solidarity. A ‘free-trade’ agreement (dominated by South African
multinational corporate interests) is under way, and aims to eliminate inter-
regional barriers to trade and investment in 2006. If it is brought to fruition,
a gradual homogenisation of regional economic conditions can be
predicted. But the deal could just as easily intensify the region’s polarising
tendencies, given the parallel process of South African capital’s expansion
and the linkage of the region to Europe and North America through
unfavourable free-trade pacts.
A variety of other compelling reasons have also emerged since the end of
apartheid for action on a regional scale to be taken up more enthusiastically
by workers and their allies. Cross-border social and cultural connections
have intensified; long-term migration patterns have begun to solidify since
permanent residence was granted to long-term guestworkers by the South
African government in 1995; controlling arms, drugs and other illicit traffic
needs regional co-operation, as does the management of regional resources
such as water; the artificiality of nation states sired at the colonial-Africa-
carve-up conference in Berlin in 1885 is more readily questioned as post-
colonial nationalism fades; and there is wider recognition of the worsening
unevenness of development and related ethnic tensions between the rich
and poor areas of the region.
Our scan of harsh regional realities – and progressive prospects driven
not by Washington and its proxies, but instead by popular forces in the
region – necessarily begins in the core industrial sites, i.e. mainly in the large
cities of South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as their now-declining mining
regions. There, black workers established the first organisational roots of
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 33
S OUTHERN A FRICAN SOCIO - ECONOMIC CONFLICT 33
class power as early as the 1920s, often in the face of opposition from
higher-skilled white workers and artisans.
The ebb and flow of black working-class power was heightened by
impressive industrial unrest during the 1940s, followed by a downturn
associated with intensified state repression, the formal establishment of
apartheid in 1948 and the banning of trade unions or their leaders in many
of the colonial regimes. Later, from the 1950s, working-class power was
overlaid by the rise of national political movements. As these movements
gained progressively greater access to state power across Southern Africa –
and yet soon proved themselves hostile to working-class interests and
ambitions – workers had to decide whether and how to strive for a post-
colonial, post-nationalist and post-neo-liberal future.
In the immediate future, as Southern Africa remains mired in sustained
economic crisis, the logic of neo-liberalism will have to be contested not
only through defensive protest, but through both a new regionalism and
more effective international solidarity, to serve working-class interests and
those of poor people, and to protect regional ecology from corporate plun-
der. There exists a broad framework for this line of argument, namely a
United Nations World Institute for Development Economics research proj-
ect, whose leading African proponent, Samir Amin, advocates ‘regionalisa-
tion aiming at the building of a polycentric world’, in part grounded in
‘grassroots labour-popular social hegemonies’.2 It is with this potential proj-
ect in mind that I will attempt to document lines of cleavage between and
within the region’s working classes and state-capital alliances.
Hence the main sections of this chapter interrelate: Section 2 deals with
the historical colonial-capitalist origins of the region and the genesis of its
proletariats; Section 3 with the contemporary economic crisis; Section 4
with working-class responses to crisis conditions; and Section 5 with diver-
gent opportunities for regional class formation. At the site where these
come together – in the potential contestation of regionalism between work-
ers and the region’s states/capitals (dominated as they tend to be by South
African bureaucrats and corporations) – I will assess existing regional and
even global strategies and tactics in Part four, and propose new ones.
2. Origins of the regional proletariat

To understand the region and its working class in the 21st century requires
us to consider, however briefly, its formation in the late 19th. There we find
durable aspects of class/race/gender/environmental power serving a
process of capital accumulation in more than a dozen major urban centres,
with capital ultimately flowing to London, New York and Lisbon. Over the
course of the past century or so, diverse international and intraregional
connections were forged through trade, transport and communications
links, customs unions, the regional investment strategies of South African
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 34
corporations, conflict over natural resources (especially water), and labour

migration. Early commercial imperialism during the so-called ‘Scramble for
Africa’ was codified by the Berlin conference of 1885, at which colonial
boundaries (which would in the 20th century become the national bound-
aries of newly independent African states) were demarcated by Britain,
Portugal, France, Germany and Belgium.
The region’s partial, disarticulated proletarianisation occurred initially
through mining and related industries, not only on the Johannesburg reef,
but also in patches of Zimbabwe (which was called ‘Southern Rhodesia’
until 1965 and then ‘Rhodesia’ until 1979) and the copper fields of Zambia
(‘Northern Rhodesia’ until independence in 1964). Of greatest interest, of
course, is the fate of indigenous black African people under the compulsion
of new wage/labour disciplines.
Yet even earlier, many white workers in and around the Kimberley
diamond mines, the Johannesburg gold fields and the railways imported
European traditions of trade unionism and mutual aid (e.g. building
societies) as early as the 1880s. By the 1910s a brand of imported ‘commu-
nism’ (which was imbued with racism and sexism) flared brightly prior to
the famous 1922 white mineworkers’ strike (with the egregious slogan
‘Workers of the world, unite for a white South Africa!’). In the wake of
effective state repression, a co-opted white Labour Party then allied itself
with other disaffected social layers within the South African government, as
did a similar group of unionised white artisanal populists in Southern
Rhodesia just to the north. In both of these rapidly industrialising places
during the 1930s, there emerged from white capital-labour alliances a
‘whites-only’ welfare state generous with job-creation programmes, pension
schemes, health benefits, housing and the like (especially for rural
Afrikaners displaced to cities, who made up ‘the poor-white problem’).
With the impressive rise of inward-oriented manufacturing and dev-
elopment/finance systems, many white workers evolved into middle-class
managerialism. Meanwhile in South Africa, black workers found labour
markets increasingly attractive as local growth raised black wages in relation
to white wages by an unprecedented (before or since) 50% during the
1930s–40s.
Worker power(lessness)
How, in this process, were indigenous African people disenfranchised and
(partially) proletarianised? Once the colonial spoils were divided at Berlin,
the British government mandated the Cape prime minister Cecil John
Rhodes and his British South Africa Company (BSAC) to seize a vast area
stretching north from Lesotho (then called Basutoland). The British military
beat back resistance from the region’s Africans (most decisively in Southern
Rhodesia during the 1890s) and from Afrikaners (in the Anglo-Boer War of
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 35
1899–1902). British settlers therefore gave birth to the socio-political

construct of Southern Africa. Using traditional techniques to strip land
from indigenous peoples – ‘hut taxes’, debt peonage systems and fees for
cattle-dipping and grazing, as well as other more direct forms of compulsion
– the settlers drew African men from the fields, into the mines and emerging
factories.3 But it took more than geopolitical influence and investment to
form a regional working class. Racialised capitalism throughout Southern
Africa also came to depend heavily upon extraordinarily ‘cheap’ migrant
labour and various forms of extra-economic coercion. The Johannesburg
mining houses soon organised a Chamber of Mines in order to establish
recruitment offices in far-flung parts of the region. Northern Rhodesia’s
copper mines and various Southern Rhodesian enterprises also followed the
migrant labour model.
The system’s profitability and durability relied initially upon a social
subsidy – from household production by the families of the migrant workers
back home on the land – that allowed wages to be set well below the cost of
reproduction of labour power. In short, white capital and white-ruled states
in the region spent next to nothing on black education in rural areas, on
black workers’ and their families’ healthcare, or on black workers’ pensions.
The subsidy came partly from exhausting the ecology of the ‘bantustan’
(homeland) labour reserves, where land and water were degraded over time
by overpopulation pressure, millions of people having been forcibly
removed from ‘white’ parts of South Africa and Rhodesia. But the subsidy
was mainly provided by the household production of rural women. Without
jobs, they were denied pass-books, and without pass-books, they were
denied access to the white settlers’ major cities, even for conjugal visits to
their partners working there. To find male workers at home in the rural
areas for only a couple of weeks a year was not uncommon.
Migrant labour remains a core element of the surplus extraction process
today, but with cash remittances from the cities now balancing the rural-
urban subsidy. One indication of how badly South African capital required
cheap immigrant workers was the reversal in 1986 of the decision by P.W.
Botha, president of apartheid-ruled South Africa, to expel several hundred
thousand Mozambican workers (as part of his regional destabilisation
initiative), following pressure from the Chamber of Mines, whose members
require 200 000 foreign workers for gold production alone even in the wake
of dramatic downsizing in the 1990s.4
Worker power
Over the course of a century, resistance by black workers to this diabolical
system was often violent and decisive, but sporadic. Sometimes, every-day
survival strategies generated defensive mutual-aid societies, such as the
‘burial’ societies and social clubs (especially based on dancing, and oriented
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 36
to ‘homeboy’ networks) which emerged at the turn of the century. Yet

militancy was not far away, and under the difficult conditions of the 1920s
– inflation, stagnant incomes, tightening racial restrictions and increasing
hardship – the Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU) flourished as a
general-workers’ union straddling urban and rural workers across the
region, and drawing members from as far afield as Rhodesia and Nyasaland
(now Malawi). The ICU called for defiance of the pass laws, negotiated with
municipalities over worker grievances and campaigned for minimum
wages. But ultimately the movement failed to match its fiery rhetoric with
action. Formed during a 1919–20 dock-workers’ strike, over time the ICU,
with its 250 000 members, became demoralised as internal strategic differ-
ences widened. White communists were expelled in 1926, and because of
leadership conservatism – exemplified in the slogan ‘hamba kahle’ (go care-
fully) – various provincial branches seceded, until during the early 1930s
the ICU faced its demise.5
Likewise, the Communist Party of South Africa fell into a deep internal
ideological crisis during the 1930s over the race/class debate, and even
vibrant new ‘red unions’ could not sustain strikes. Revolutionary socialists
led by Max Gordon (a close associate of Leon Trotsky) were somewhat
more successful, grouping six unions with a combined membership of
15 700 into a Joint Committee. But the black political field was left mainly
to the African National Congress, which from its founding in 1912 until the
mid-1950s was dominated by petit-bourgeois leaders championing
extremely moderate strategies.6
During the high-growth period of the late 1930s and early 1940s, black
worker militancy increased (in 1942, for example, 58 strikes involved over
13 000 workers). Communists helped launch the Congress of Non-
European Trade Unions, yet neither they nor the ANC gave effective
support to the crucial African mineworkers’ strike of 1946. Though nearly
100 000 black miners struck for five days, it ended in bitter defeat, with 13
of their number killed and 1 000 arrested. The whites-only election of 1948
introduced formal apartheid. During the same year a general strike in
Bulawayo and Salisbury (now Harare) also surprised Southern Rhodesia’s
nationalist and communist movements, but was also severely repressed by
a powerful white state.
In the 1940s and 1950s, even the region’s poorest white families had
graduated from ‘poor-white’ status to being masters of a ‘house-girl’ or
‘house-boy’. But even with over half a million African women servants by
the 1940s, all attempts to organise domestic workers failed, even in South
Africa. Women were associated in the white media with illegal beer-
brewing, hawking and prostitution. ‘Surplus’ women in urban areas were
hounded by the state, and whether ‘illegal’, deserted, widowed or
unmarried, found security only in squatter communities on the peripheries
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 37
of towns. Township social movements like Soweto’s Sofasonke and

Alexandra’s bus boycotts grew strong and gave rise to successful land
invasions, thanks to the solidarity and desperation of women activists.
Labour, community and politics

Yet labour and community struggles seldom overlapped during the 1950s
and 1960s, for South Africa’s shanty-town struggles were abandoned or
diffused by middle-class leaders. However, the ANC became progressively
radicalised by the youth wing, led by Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and
Walter Sisulu. ANC leaders encouraged workers to join the South African
Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), but moulded the unions to fit the
nationalist agenda. Banned along with black liberation movements during
the early 1960s, SACTU lost most of its leading activists to ANC
underground work, demoralisation or exile. Moreover, the rapid growth of
mass-production industry changed the relative weight, numerical power
and locations of black workers.7 A similar process unfolded in Southern
Rhodesia, with numerous bannings of parties interspersed by the rise of
important links between trade unions and nationalists, illustrated by the
rapid rise to the status of ‘father of the nation’ of Joshua Nkomo, a railroad
union organiser.8
The deepening of proletarian class formation changed the character of
politics, but only once a new round of more general anti-apartheid protest
was kickstarted across the region during the 1970s. Between 1950 and
1980, the number of black workers in South Africa’s manufacturing sector
rose from 360 000 to 1 103 000, and in mining from 450 000 to 768 000.
Increasingly strident forms of worker organisation were catalysed by the
1973 dockworkers’ strikes in Durban. By 1976, trade unionism paralleled
Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and the student-led revolts
that began in Soweto that year.
At the time of the launch of the Congress of South African Trade Unions
(Cosatu) in 1985, some 12 000 black shop stewards represented an
advanced guard of self-sacrificing militants, combining action within work-
places, schools, townships and cities. In contrast to the sterile organising of
the 1950s, the mid-1980s witnessed the metamorphosis of trade unions into
nerve centres of informal resistance across the political spectrum.
For example, at the height of P W Botha’s state of emergency in 1987–9,
commuter trains in Johannesburg’s industrial heartland became trans-
mission belts of political mobilisation and education. Industrial Area
Committees sprouted up and workers occupied factories in a rash of sleep-
in strikes. Anti-apartheid political mobilisation found new channels of
expression.9
The unprecedented growth in Cosatu’s membership and power in the
1980s was not an isolated phenomenon. Similar processes were evident
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 38
across the whole semi-periphery, from Brazil and the Philippines to Poland
and South Korea, besides other Southern African countries. Cosatu served
as a regional role model and gave direct assistance to unions in Namibia,
Zambia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland.
In Namibia, a decade after the severe repression of the 1970s, unionism
made a comeback when mass stayaways won the support of 70% of
workers (in sympathy with school boycotts and opposition to South Africa’s
role in the country). But relations between nationalists and the unions were
often tense, as the former feared that too successful a union movement
would displace the national liberation movement. Ben Ulenga, leader of
Namibian mineworkers, faced bruising encounters with the South West
Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo), which summoned him to Europe
during a strike at Rössing Uranium mine to tell him that workers had no
right to decide when strikes should be called.10
Across the region during the 1960s–90s, nationalist politics dictated that
workers tone down or repress class demands, in the process undermining
internal democracy.11 During the early 1980s, ‘workerists’ within the South
African labour left – the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu,
later to become Cosatu) – saw their movement not only in terms of trade
unionism but also as a potential political alternative to the ANC’s
‘populism’. According to the Fosatu general secretary, Joe Foster, national-
ists ‘would destroy the unity of worker organisation. Our concern is with
the very essence of politics and that is the relation between the major classes
in South Africa, being capital and labour. We should not hesitate to attack
those who are impeding the development of a working class movement’.12
Conversely, the ANC writer known as Mzala contended: ‘It is actually
impossible for South Africa to advance to socialism before the national
liberation of the black oppressed nation.’13 Under pressure by the mid-
1980s, key workerists quietly made peace with nationalists, whose township
and rural prestige was immensely greater. Yet throughout the region,
powerful tensions between nationalism and socialism remained. When a
unified Marxist-Leninist-nationalist project (e.g. Zimbabwe, Mozambique
and Angola) graduated from oppositional to state power, the working
classes were inevitably disappointed.
Nationalism was not the only challenge to working-class politics. The
sensibility of Southern African labour transcends the boundaries of
factories, fields and mines, merging with broader social movements to
spawn a host of popular protest activities. Another challenge faced by
workers comes from market ideologues who have regularly blamed labour
militancy for stagnation. Yet working-class organisation and political
orientation are hardly responsible for the region’s structural social,
economic and environmental problems. For those, we must remind
ourselves of the very logic of capitalist crisis formation.
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 39
3. Structural socio-economic and environmental decline

The systemic class exploitation and race/gender domination outlined above
generated very high profits until the last quarter of the 20th century. Then
a long-term crisis began. During the two decades from 1960 to 1980, black
nationalist movements north of South Africa intensified the momentum of
liberation, but then presided over a degeneration into debt, dependency
and neo-colonial subjugation. As I discussed in the previous chapter, terms
of trade moved decisively against non-petroleum mineral and agriculture
mono-exports and real international interest rates on borrowed money
soared during the 1980s. Soon enough, ‘globalisation’ revealed most of the
region’s manufacturing to be uncompetitive, particularly after 1990.
From such economic crisis and material desperation follow many of the
geopolitical dilemmas of the 1980s–90s, including violent regional conflicts
(manifesting themselves in civil war and strife in Angola, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa,
Zambia and Zimbabwe, which killed as many as two million people and set
nationalist rulers against each other), and growing arms traffic.
With a few exceptions – namely Mauritius and Botswana, for very
specific, non-reproducible reasons – Southern African economic conditions
have been depressed since the mid-1970s, especially since the early 1980s in
gold-producing countries (as the price of an ounce of gold fell from a high
of $850 in 1981 to just above $250 in mid-1999). Dividing the most recent
period for which reliable data are available into an immediate post-colonial
‘developmental’ era (1965–80), followed by generalised ‘structural adjust-
ment’ (1980–95), even official statistics reveal the decay.
If we add to the ten core Southern African countries high-growth
Mauritius and Seychelles on the one hand, and declining Tanzania and the
DRC on the other (the two pairs offsetting each other) – we find that the
SADC 14-country average annual per-capita GDP growth – corrected for
currency fluctuations through the ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ measure14 –
was 3.0% from 1965 to 1980 and –0.7% from 1980 to 1995. The latter
period saw foreign debt servicing double from 5% to 10% of export earn-
ings, with Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi paying more than
20% by 1995. The largest economy, South Africa, declined from 3.2%
per-capita annual GDP growth in the first period to –1.0% in the second.
Historical precedent
Southern African economic prospects were perhaps most adversely affected
by South Africa’s skewed 20th-century industrialisation process and more
recent experiences of deindustrialisation. South Africa’s economy is itself
characterised by severe disarticulations. A ‘minerals-energy complex’ still
comprises the core quarter of the economy, encompassing gold, coal,
petrochemicals, electricity generation, processed-metals products, mining
Chapter 2
Table 2: Southern African socio-economic and labour-market conditions: Various indicators, mid-1990s–200015
40
7/22/03
Country GDP per Agric. Indus. Gini Human Population Lab. Force Formal Union Density
P OWERS
capita as % of as % of Coefficient Devel. (’000s) (’000s) jobs members (%)
(PPP US$) GDP GDP Index [% fem.] [civ. serv.] (’000s)
6:32 pm
AND VULNERABILITIES
Angola 1 839 12 59 n.a. .344 11 099 5 103 [46] n.a. [138] n.a. n.a.
Botswana 5 611 5 56 53.7 .678 1 533 528 [46] 288 [98] 59 20
Page 40
Lesotho 1 290 10 46 56.0 .469 2 023 825 [37] 250 [n.a.] 36 14
Malawi 773 42 27 62.0 .334 10 016 4 848 [49] 558 [48] 75 14
Mozam. 959 33 12 n.a. .281 18 028 9 145 [49] 450 [63] 190 42
Namibia 4 054 14 30 70.0 .644 1 584 435 [41] 260 [67] 106 41
S. Africa 4 334 5 31 58.4 .717 37 859 9 787 [37] 5 708 3 202 56

[1 562]
Swazi. 2 954 14 45 n.a. .597 926 327 [37] 57 [n.a.] 21 44
Zambia 986 22 40 46.2 .378 8 275 3 854 [45] 469 [151] 280 60
Zimbab. 2 135 15 36 56.8 .507 11 247 4 948 [45] 1 497 [175] 350 23
Most years 1995 (consistency ensured in SADC Regional Human Development Report); PPP = Purchasing Power Parity; Industry
includes mining, energy and manufacturing; Density = union members as a % of formal sector jobs.
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 41
machinery and some other, closely related manufactured outputs.16

Intermediate capital goods, especially machines that make other machines,
remain underdeveloped, while luxury goods are produced locally at close to
world standards (if not prices), thanks to high relative levels of (tradition-
ally white) consumer demand based on extreme income inequality, decades
of protective tariffs and the presence of major multinational corporate
branch plants. Meanwhile, basic-needs industries are extremely sparse, as
witnessed by the inadequate output of low-cost housing, dangerous and
relatively costly transport, and the underproduction of cheap, simple
appliances and clothing (which are increasingly imported), at the same time
that social services and the social wage have been set at extremely low levels
for the majority.
Reflecting the local overaccumulation crisis, South African manufactur-
ing average profit rates fell steadily from 40% during the 1950s to less than
15% during the 1980s, and reinvestment dropped by 2% each year during
the 1980s. By the trough of the 1989–93 depression, net fixed capital
investment was down to just 1% of GDP, compared with 16% during the
1970s. From 1994 to 1996, fixed investment picked up, but then settled
back into malaise, and the country consistently recorded bottom-tenth
rankings in World Economic Forum competitiveness surveys. Post-
apartheid trade liberalisation demolished several key South African indus-
tries, including electronics, appliances, footwear, clothing and textiles.17
The regional situation was even worse. Between 1992 and 1994 alone,
Zimbabwe’s largest textile company and more than 60 clothing firms
collapsed.18 The country became little more than a re-export platform for
what were technically ‘dumped’ South and East Asian textiles and second-
hand clothes from European aid agencies. Zambia’s clothing and textile
industries likewise suffered dramatically during the trade liberalisation of
the early 1990s, with 90% of garment and more than a quarter of weaving
jobs lost.
Regional deindustrialisation and degradation

Accompanying and contributing to the structural decline in the regional
economy was the simultaneous failure of orthodox structural adjustment
policies. Notwithstanding vocal labour protest, South Africa adopted its
Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy in 1996. But from
1996 to 1999, virtually all Gear’s targets were missed. To illustrate,
formal-sector non-agricultural net job losses from 1996 to 1999 amounted to
500 000, instead of the net employment gains Gear anticipated of 950 000
new jobs.
Zimbabwe suffered similarly at the hands of a 1991–5 ‘Economic
Structural Adjustment Programme’ (ESAP) which, against all evidence to
the contrary, the World Bank’s Project Completion Report gave the best
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 42
possible final grade: ‘highly satisfactory’.19 All of Zimbabwe’s macro-

economic objectives failed, e.g. the share of manufacturing in GDP
dropped from a peak of 32% in 1992 to 17% in 1998.
The same was true of virtually every structural adjustment programme in
the region. Dramatic changes in consumption norms followed currency
crashes, the lifting of subsidies and price controls and the destruction of
local manufacturing by import liberalisation, reducing even the small
middle class, mainly found in the African civil service, to poverty. Officially
set minimum wages dropped far below the starvation line in most countries
in the region.
Even if a tiny group of state elites, merchants, financiers, compradors
(i.e. local people who have allied themselves with global capitalism) and
other ‘rentier’ types benefited from regional economic restructuring, the
vulnerable in Southern African societies paid most for the stagnation and
decline of the past quarter of a century. State services could not keep up,
whether in a country as wealthy as South Africa (the site of the world’s
first-ever heart transplant, but where most rural black people still have no
primary healthcare) or one as poor as Mozambique. Indeed, in the latter
country, World Bank conditionality for meagre debt relief in 1998 included
a quintupling of user charges for public-health services and ‘sharp’
increases in water prices (as will be discussed in Chapter three). However,
the rot didn’t stop in society, but spread to the natural environment.
The structural decay of nature

There are many crucial intersections of class formation (and also of class
destruction) and ecological exploitation, some of which occur explicitly at
a regional scale between dominant global circuits of capital and denuded
nation states. To facilitate higher profits and larger volumes of foreign
investment, those states have simultaneously externalised environmental
costs and, in the process, became hostile to social change. As individual
units contested by populist-nationalists and a new generation of post-
nationalist political parties, the region’s states remain unappealing, even
where post-nationalist parties are grounded in trade unions.
We must therefore consider whether, in turn, workers can potentially
draw for their 21st-century consciousness upon a legacy of regional class
formation and struggle that dates to the establishment of migrant labour
systems for mines, plantations and manufacturing in the late 19th century.
Can, in short, a more coherent Southern Africa eco-socialist vision emerge
to counteract uneven capitalist development, transcend nationalist ideology,
extinguish deep-burning xenophobic fires (which have scorched potential
working-class solidarity) and establish economies of scale sufficient for a
delinked contribution to polycentrism along the lines Samir Amin
recommends (see endnote 2) some time in the future?
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 43
Regional water wars

It may well be that radical environmentalism can provide part of an impetus
to this political project, given the need for far-reaching changes in eco-social
power relations in each country. In relation to water, for example, all South
Africa’s neighboring countries are affected by Pretoria’s mismanaged
systems of cross-border water acquisition and consumption (especially
Namibia and Lesotho), flood-control (proven lethally inadequate to
Mozambicans in early 2000 and again in 2001), persistent pollution, limited
downstream availability and related legal arrangements. The excess control
of water-rights allocations by South African white farming capital is
particularly obnoxious when most local black rural people are deprived of
even the 60 litres per person per day promised in the 1994 Reconstruction
and Development Programme (RDP).
Intense struggles over access to border rivers break out regularly
between South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Angola.
Debates rage over the implications of the proposed transmission of water
through pipelines from the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River to major
industrial conurbations to the south, as well as from the Democratic
Republic of the Congo to desperately dry Namibian towns.
Further dam-building will exacerbate evaporation, yet the revelation that
hydro-electric power contributes more to global warming than the region’s
huge coal-fired thermal plants is not likely to dampen the enthusiasm of
Mozambican officials for another three huge dams on the Zambezi. Two
other large World Bank dams – the ongoing Lesotho Highlands Water
Project and the Kariba Dam (built on the Zambezi in 1956 as the world’s
then-largest artificial lake) – each displaced tens of thousands of indigenous
people.
Working-class movements have arisen in South Africa recently to oppose
cross-catchment water transfers (using large dams, and at the expense of
the poor), water contamination, the hedonistic use of water and its
corporatisation and privatisation. Free lifeline supplies and higher
standards of infrastructure are part of a rights-based discourse adopted by
key South African trade unions and civic and women’s groups, while many
white, middle-class environmentalists have joined the campaigns. A victory
was won in late 2000, when the ANC promised free lifeline water and other
municipal services as part of its municipal electoral pledges. But sabotage-
minded bureaucrats and weak politicians could easily ensure that this
becomes another set of ‘rumours, dreams and promises’ (as the RDP has
been cynically retitled).
In Zimbabwe, not only have social movements recently made similar
rights-based claims to water access (in the broad-based National
Constitutional Assembly’s popular draft constitution), but consciousness has
also grown over excessively generous colonial-era irrigation arrangements
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 44
for white farmers, especially in the tobacco sector. Water-rights allocations

between Zimbabwe and Zambia on the Zambezi River’s Lake Kariba have
been hotly contested in class conflicts between lake- and river-side peasants
and industrialists dependent upon both hydro-electric power and water for
industrial use (mainly in Bulawayo).
In addition, as I will discuss in Chapter three, controversies have arisen
over the privatisation of municipal and rural water systems – and ‘dramatic’
retail-price increases – as a central World Bank condition for Mozambican
debt relief. In Namibia, the indigenous Himba people and environmentalist
allies have nearly halted a major dam project, Epupa, despite the fact that it
was strongly supported by President Sam Nujoma. In the interests of
unifying such struggles, a Southern African network of environmental and
community activists working on water issues came together in 1999,
facilitated by the International Rivers Network and its local partners.
In most of these cases, there are not only local agents fouling the regional
environment, but also a global network of neo-liberal institutions aiming to
commodify water and nature more generally: the World Bank, the World
Bank/UN Development Programme (UNDP) World Water Forum, and
behind these, transnational construction firms, for-profit French and
British water corporations, and privatisation-pushing merchant banks. In
this situation, the possibility for increasing regional unity amongst workers
and allied working-class social movements is necessarily also the possibility
for decommodified, destratified and ultimately non-capitalist forms of the
relationship between humans and nature. In this way, regionalism through
eco-socialist politics offers a significant way forward for the Southern
African working class.
Naturally, however, there will be opponents who remain far more
committed to the maintenance of capital accumulation and existing class
relations. Their role in the inter-related health, environment and water
crises, as well as other aspects of social and economic decline, contributed
to the growing sense of desperation of regional workers – and in some
cases to their willingness to organise not only for immediate economic
demands, but also to change society, or at the very least, the government.
4. Workers, organisations and class politics

In what condition have these multiple and interlocking economic and social
crises left Southern African workers? For the sake of brevity, I will focus on
the concentrated sites of commodity production, both formal and informal,
in which workers come into contact with each other, and with the direct
surplus-extraction system.
Across Africa, organised labour’s reactions have in part flowed directly
from the crisis conditions discussed above.20 Yet even in the advanced
South African economy, workplace trends incorporating greater flexibility,
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 45
the outsourcing of labour and the subcontracting of union jobs have

together made the documentation of class relations very difficult. In
general, conflict and consent do not correspond directly and easily with the
contours of core and periphery. Permanent workforces are not necessarily
more militant or co-opted than contingent workforces, despite these
inequalities in material conditions.
The numbers tell at least some of this story (see Table 2, above). Of
around 100 million people living in the ten core countries of Southern
Africa, the potential ‘labour force’ is estimated at less than one-third
(32 million). But, more importantly, only about one in every ten people is
‘formally’ employed. Approximately 40% of these are now organised,
however. Although employment in non-agricultural sectors has been
declining since the mid-1980s, Southern African trade unions have claimed
growing membership over the past decade, contrary to waning unionisation
rates in most parts of the world.
In some sectors, the organising of workers only became legal over the
past two decades, so that, for example, domestic and commercial agricul-
tural workers are having some success with nascent unions. Namibia, South
Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe are recording impressive increases in
union membership, although extensive privatisation in Zambia has led to a
contraction. Continuous organising drives amongst the region’s stronger
unions maintain membership at high levels, withstanding the effects of even
mass retrenchments. These figures show substantial union power.
Post-nationalism?
Working classes are also increasingly adopting political positions in
opposition to their governments. As Namibian labour researcher Herbert
Jauch puts it, ‘With the SADC divided along political lines, trade unions
have achieved a higher degree of unity than ruling nationalist parties.’21 A
regional perspective and discourse may, indeed, override a variety of
national limitations. Fred Cooper argues that ‘The tension between
workers’ claims to globally defined entitlements and Africans’ assertions of
political rights as Africans was, during the 1940s and early 1950s, a creative
and empowering one.’22 In contemporary struggles, though, a regional and
more universalist paradigm potentially allows workers to raise demands for
higher standards of socio-economic rights more forcefully. In contrast, the
trap of nationalist corporatism, within a framework that supports competi-
tiveness, was a questionable labour strategy, once liberation movements
moved sharply right.23
Politically, Southern African unions spent some hard years in the post-
independence era breaking away from ruling-party tutelage and explicit
state repression (although Mozambican and Malawian unions are still
heavily influenced by their governments). In countries with relatively robust
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 46
political-party divisions that take place in the electoral sphere (or, as in

Angola, on the battleground), the political alliances of trade unions become
an issue, e.g. in Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and
Zimbabwe. But party politics and union politics are uneasy bedfellows. In
Zambia, for example, a trade unionist, Frederick Chiluba, was elected
president as leader of the multiclass Movement for Multiparty Democracy
in 1991 following 27 years of Kenneth Kaunda’s nationalist misrule – and
then even more forcefully implemented structural adjustment during the
1990s.
In contrast, in Zimbabwe, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union
(ZANU) regime, led interminably by the autocratic Robert Mugabe,
continued to give lip-service to socialism while carrying out unrelenting
neo-liberal policies during most of the 1990s. Political opposition rallied
around left-leaning trade-union leaders, Morgan Tsvangirai and Gibson
Sibanda, whose Movement for Democratic Change took half the vote in the
parliamentary elections in June 2000, albeit only after a dramatic shift to the
right, through endorsing neo-liberal economic precepts, so as, opportunis-
tically, to attract approximately $2 million in campaign funds from white
businesses and conservative international allies.
Likewise in Namibia, where autocratic control by President Sam
Nujoma prevents serious internal party debate, the Swapo-affiliated
National Union of Namibian Workers charged that the ruling party had
scant regard for workers: ‘if reconciliation is understood as the perpetua-
tion of apartheid and is equated with exploitation, then workers will no
longer tolerate this.’24 A post-nationalist political movement, the Congress
of Democrats, led by a former trade unionist, Ben Ulenga, became an
important opposition force after the national elections in 1999, and several
individual unions expressed a desire to end their affiliation with Swapo.25
However, several more years of neo-liberalism may be required before the
frustrations of union leaders overwhelm their nationalist loyalties.
In South Africa, more durable left-leaning politics were generally
associated with trade unions, but by the late 1990s debates raged about
whether an alliance with the ruling ANC liberation movement, which was
decidedly neo-liberal in terms of its economic policy, was helping workers
or stunting their further mobilisation and development. In practice,
however, the union movement increasingly lost its internal vibrancy.
Periodic public-sector strikes against job cuts and inadequate pay, added to
large-scale anti-privatisation demonstrations by municipal workers,
reflected widespread grassroots antipathy to ANC policies.
But in the absence of alternative political parties or a credible set of
options, workers still placed pragmatic value on the Tripartite Alliance as a
means of pressuring the ANC, even if so far, according to Glenn Adler and
Eddie Webster, such ‘pressure has objectively eroded the position of
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 47
workers’.26 In late 1999, Cosatu leaders condemned the ANC government –

specifically, the minister of public administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi
(who was also deputy-chairperson of the SA Communist Party) – for
trying to isolate and undermine workers demands by posing the dispute as
being about ‘general’ interest versus ‘sectoral’ (‘selfish’, ‘economist’) interests
of public sector workers. The ‘dirty tricks’ campaign [entailed] disinforma-
tion, and statements released to the press without consulting with the unions,
and conducting the dispute in the media. The actions of the government are
not in accord with spirit of the Tripartite Alliance, and indicate a greater
concern to appease international capital than to enhance workers rights and
speed up delivery.27
Corporatism and state control

Cosatu is also a part of the National Economic Development Council, a
corporatist arrangement in which business, state and labour jointly
formulate policy on labour and economic issues. But nearly two-thirds of
workers surveyed during the late 1990s had no knowledge of this council.28
Cosatu became increasingly vulnerable to both bureaucracy and careerism,
as leaders successfully sought paths to more lucrative government jobs. On
the other hand, this was a process reserved for a few, as many local-level
corporatist efforts in the same vein – ‘workplace forums’ mandated under
the post-apartheid Labour Relations Act, aimed at edging unions into local
co-determination of productivity – failed to take off.
The story did not advance this far elsewhere. In Botswana and especially
Swaziland, labour became the basis for progressive political-party and pro-
democracy activism, which may pose substantial challenges for neo-colonial
governments, while in Malawi, trade unions played a role in unseating a
neo-colonial dictator, President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, during the 1990s,
but did not replace him with a leader of their own. In Mozambique, nascent
unions were showing a capacity for militancy by the late 1990s. Working-
class movements in Lesotho (drawing on traditions of mine labour) and
Angola (still bedeviled by war) were slow to gather pace.
The point, perhaps, is that a major breakthrough for workers cannot
occur in one country without the rest of the regional working class seeing
some possibility of also gaining power in their own respective states, and
also simultaneously developing a regional perspective that transcends the
artificial boundaries drawn up by colonialists. We will return to this
possibility in Part four.
Regional unionism?
However, simply counting union membership and estimating labour
influence over local politics is only the beginning. The ability of federations
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 48
and individual unions to embark upon major strike action is just as vital an
indicator of strength. In Zimbabwe, autonomous, shopfloor-based actions
outran the ability of national union bureaucrats to control or direct the
membership, and the corporatist strategy mistakenly pursued during the
mid-1990s by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) quickly
became irrelevant. And in South Africa, despite the country’s deep
economic woes, union militancy increased as the state’s attack on public-
sector workers intensified.
Regionally co-ordinated actions and growing class-consciousness also
reflect progress. In Swaziland, for example, an 11-day general strike in 1996
and further strikes in 1997 led to solidarity in the form of a border blockade
organised by sister unions in South Africa and Mozambique, which forced
the anachronistic monarchy to concede worker rights. Indeed, new sections
of workers across the region are demanding similar rights to those won by
South African unions.
International and regional solidarity is probably the only real hope for
many of the less-resourced union movements, as well as the relatively
dormant Southern African Trade Union Co-ordinating Council (SATUCC)
itself. But given the difficult material conditions faced by regional unions
and the enormous tactical and strategic differences over international
economic policy (see Chapter eleven), it is vital first to enquire whether
there exists a basis for a regional working-class consciousness (as opposed
to retaining ties with nationalist allies).
5. Capital accumulation and regional visions

Can workers establish a regional class-consciousness in coming years?
Notwithstanding cross-border solidarities associated with three decades of
anti-colonial and nationalist liberation struggles from 1960 to 1990, notions
of Southern Africa remain for the most part contained within dominant
global conceptions of regionalism, namely a sub-imperial South Africa as
the gateway for capital accumulation in Africa as a whole, but organised on
a regional scale between Pretoria and the global institutions (using Thabo
Mbeki’s notion of an ‘African Renaissance’ as cover). This has required new,
post-apartheid institutional processes that take for granted a conception of
the Southern African region as a neo-liberal site of ever-amplifying, uneven
development. It remains to be seen whether there can be an alternative,
working-class regional vision, and whether class practices may emerge to
turn Southern African workers into agents for historical change.
What would a potential working-class regional solidarity have to contend
with? At least two main aspects of contemporary politics and economics
threaten the universal class interests of Southern African workers. The first
is the power of the multinational corporate/banking/free-trade/finance
agenda. But as I will discuss in Part four, the apparent power of US-centred
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 49
neo-liberalism is also pock-marked with vulnerabilities, even if the inter-

national working class remains confused over whether to try ‘fixing’ or
‘nixing’ neo-liberalism’s core institutions.
Secondly, elite-nationalists are contemplating an interlocking of South-
South interests, with workers left out of the equation. This is not merely a
matter of Robert Mugabe’s often-stated envy of the Malaysian exit option
from volatile international currency speculation (late 1999 saw Mahathir
bin Mohamad, prime minister of Malaysia, giving seminars to Southern
African leaders not only in a resort near Kuala Lumpur, but also, at
Mugabe’s insistence, at Victoria Falls). As I will consider in more detail in
Chapters seven and ten, South Africa has opened discussions about trade
and investment with a range of countries that variously included Algeria,
Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and South Korea.
Many such discussions focused on the prospects for unifying Southern
countries when bargaining with the G-7 powers over reform of an inter-
national financial and trading system that many workers and social move-
ments were concluding needed to be ‘nixed’, not ‘fixed’.
Sites of regional capitalist-class unity

But looking beyond occasional statements of Southern African and South-
South interstate solidarity to where capital is actually flowing, we may see a
hint of a more realistic regionalism, and also of worker resistance. Sub-
Saharan Africa has witnessed a renewed ebb and flow of South African
corporate penetration since around 1993. Privatisation and liberalisation of
African parastatal firms were critical points of contact, as were banking,
services, retail activity and mining firms.29
What are the implications? To consider one example hyped loudly and
regularly by Pretoria, it now transpires that ‘public-private partnerships’ in
geographically concentrated, ‘corridor’-aligned infrastructure projects
between South African investors and the region’s states are unprofitable,
for the primary reason that affordable state finance is virtually unavailable,
given Southern Africa’s huge residual liabilities to Northern creditors. Thus
Erwin castigated the North for its ‘criminal, just criminal’ lack of substan-
tive debt relief shortly after the 1999 G-8 summit in Cologne. (That this
public outburst against a lower-level US trade official occurred at the
primary site where the region’s elite meet to plan their economic strategies,
the Davos-based World Economic Forum’s Southern Africa conference,
was all the more telling.)
Under Erwin, after all, South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry
(DTI) had taken practical responsibility for the regional restructuring
required for a particularly neo-liberal, export-oriented, accumulation
process. Behind the DTI strategy is faith that ‘Spatial Development
Initiatives’ (SDIs) will add a rich fabric of ‘development’ along and within
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 50
a corridor linking key nodes of accumulation, e.g. Johannesburg–Maputo,

which embody features of ‘Export Processing Zones’ (EPZs).30 The DTI
project methodology seeks first to identify potential port/rail/EPZ
complexes in an underdeveloped target area that might be of interest to
investors, and then help local stakeholders plan and promote infrastruc-
tural investments which improve access.31 After the ANC’s first term of
office, only two of the 14 proposed SDIs were operative. But the official
consensus around the merits of an SDI strategy – no matter the lack of
theoretical basis in economic geography, the environmental destruction, the
capital-intensive orientation and the lack of backward-forward linkages to
generate other economic activities32 – shows how far a regional version of
the Washington vision of export-led globalisation enjoys hegemony
amongst Southern African policy-makers.
Such a regional strategy requires institutional frameworks, such as
SADC, an institution initiated by Northern donor governments during the
1980s to help combat apartheid, which changed uneasily – with a major
hiccup in 1999 resulting from staff corruption, requiring an entirely new
secretariat – into an organisation for free-trade deals under the rubric of
regional integration, co-operation and harmonisation. As early as 1989,
SADC committed the region to becoming a free-trade area by 2006, but
progress was slow, including steps backward when during the mid-1990s
Zimbabwe and Zambia imposed tariffs on imported South African
manufactures that were threatening entire domestic industries. In August
2000, finally, in the wake of the retirement of Zimbabwean trade minister
Nathan Shamuyarira (whose replacement, banker Nkosana Moyo, was
classically neo-liberal in matters of principle), a free-trade deal for Southern
Africa was signed by SADC members.
Aside from SADC, other parallel and occasionally competing institutional
arrangements for the region (most of which will probably be merged or fade
over time) include the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa
(from which, tellingly, Tanzania and Mozambique resigned because of fear
of domination by Egyptian producers), the South African Customs Union (a
long-standing free-trade deal between SA, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland
and Namibia) and the Common Monetary Union, while WTO membership
will open up other regional and bilateral relationships, e.g. bringing in
Angola and Mozambique, which otherwise are not involved in non-SADC
free-trade arrangements.
An alternative working-class regionalism

But all such bilateral and multilateral deals are premised, it is clear, upon
export orientation, not inward industrialisation, and upon increasingly
‘flexible’ and competitive labour markets. Southern African labour under-
stands this, implicitly, even if SATUCC and the federations of each country
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 51
have not yet established an alternative vision. To this end, SATUCC advisor
Dot Keet has proposed that to ‘deglobalize’ from neo-liberal, multinational
corporate and financial influence requires not only alliances with those in
the North seeking ‘innovative alternatives to over-producing/consuming
capitalism,’ but also a proactive, internally oriented regionalism.33
As I will argue in Part four, the elaboration of such an alternative
regional-global strategy is in the interests of poor and working people in
Southern Africa, and could also be the basis for a global working-class
strategy. Such a strategy would ultimately entail not only regional delinking
from neo-liberal imperialism (in alliance with Northern social and labour
movements, which would simultaneously weaken the grip of imperialism),
but also relinking along South-South axes. However, such a strategy must
first confront some extremely serious contradictions within the local and
international labour movements themselves, and in their relations with
national governments. These I will take up again in Part four.
Notes
1 To establish our boundaries, the Southern African Development Community
(SADC) comprises both strong and frail nation states: Angola, Botswana, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius,
Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and
Zimbabwe. The large, well-populated but impoverished island of Madagascar also
belongs, geographically, but is generally excluded because of its isolation and
Francophone heritage. For the purposes of this chapter, I will mainly consider the
capital flows, labour movements and regional linkages within the ten most-southern,
mainland countries, i.e. omitting the DRC, Mauritius, Seychelles and Tanzania.
2 Amin, S. (1999), ‘Regionalization in Response to Polarizing Globalization’, in Bjorn
Hettne, Andras Inotai and Osvaldo Sunkel (eds), Globalism and the New
Regionalism, London, Macmillan, p. 77.
3 Similar imperatives were introduced in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique and
Angola, and in Namibia (the German-run former South West Africa until South
Africa took over after World War I. South Africa retained the name ‘South West
Africa’, then changed it to ‘South West Africa/Namibia a few years before
independence. For the sake of simplicity, I have called it ‘Namibia’ throughout.).
But such accumulation was mainly based upon extractive rather than settler-
oriented economics, through control of plantation labour.
4 Torres, L. (ed.) (1998), One out of Ten: The Labour Market in Southern Africa, Oslo,
Fafo, p. 56. Nearly half of these workers are from Lesotho, with another third from
Mozambique and the balance from Swaziland and Botswana. The definitive work on
migrancy is McDonald, D. (ed.) (2000), On Borders: Perspectives on International
Migration in Southern Africa, New York, St. Martin’s Press.
5 Roux, R. (1964), Time Longer than Rope, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.
6 McKinley, D. (1997), The ANC: A Political Biography, London, Pluto Press.
7 Fine, R. and Davies, D. (1991), Beyond Apartheid, London, Pluto Press.
8 Raftopoulos, B. and Phimister, I. (eds) (1998), Keep on Knocking: A History of the
Labour Movement in Zimbabwe, 1990–97, Harare, Baobab.
9 Mayekiso, M. (1996), Township Politics, New York, Monthly Review Press; Ruiters,
G. (2000), ‘Urban Struggles and Urban Defeats in the 1980s’, Urban Forum, 11(1).
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 52
10 Leys, C. and Saul, J. (1995), Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: A Two-edged Sword,

London, James Currey, p. 84.
11 Saul, J. (1999), ‘Liberation without Democracy’, in Jonathan Hyslop (ed.), African
Democracy, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, p. 167.
12 Fosatu Workers News, April 1982, p. 2. See also Lewis, D. (1986), ‘Capital, Trade
Unions and Liberation’, South Africa Labour Bulletin, 11(4), p. 35.
13 Cited in Saul, J. (1988), ‘Class, Race and the Future of Socialism’, in W. Cobbett and
R. Cohen (eds), Popular Struggles in South Africa, London, James Currey, p. 216.
14 Without such corrections, the collapse in per-capita GDP is enormous, leaving
Southern Africa with six of the world’s 16 poorest countries: the DRC ($110),
Mozambique ($140), Malawi ($210), Tanzania ($210), Madagascar ($250) and
Angola ($260), according to The World Bank Atlas, Washington, DC, 1999.
15 Sources: UNDP Human Development Report 1998, New York; SADC Regional
Human Development Report 1998, Southern African Political and Economic Series,
Harare; Torres, op. cit.; World Labour Report 1997/98, ILO, Geneva; Trade Unions
of the World 1996, ILO, Geneva; Africa Competitiveness Report 1998, Davos.
16 Fine, B. and Rustomjee, Z. (1996), The Political Economy of South Africa: From
Minerals-Energy Complex to Industrialisation, London, Christopher Hurst and
Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press.
17 Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa,
London, Pluto Press and Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, Chapter 1.
18 Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (1996), Beyond ESAP, Harare, p. 48.
19 World Bank (1995), Project Completion Report: Zimbabwe: Structural Adjustment
Program, Country Operations Division, Washington, DC, p. 23.
20 Callaghy, T. and Ravenhill, J. (eds) (1993), Hemmed In: Responses to Africa’s
Economic Decline, New York, Columbia University Press.
21 Jauch, H. (1999), ‘Building a Regional Labour Movement’, South African Labour
Bulletin, 23(1), p. 85.
22 Cooper, F. (1996), Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in
French and British Africa, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 468.
23 Bassett, C. and Clarke, M. (2000), ‘Class Struggle’, Southern African Report, March.
24 Leys and Saul, op. cit., p. 167.
25 Nyman, R. (1998), ‘An Overview of Namibian Unions’, in Torres, op. cit., p. 162.
26 Adler, G. and Webster, E. (2000), ‘South Africa: Class Compromise’, Southern
Africa Report, March.
27 Cosatu press statement on public-sector strike, December 1999,
http://www.cosatu.org.za.
28 Satgar, V. and Jardine, C. (1999), ‘Cosatu and the Tripartite Alliance’, South African
Labour Bulletin, 23(3), p. 8.
29 Ahwireng-Obeng, F. and McGowan, P. (1998), ‘Partner or Hegemon? South Africa
in Africa’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 16(1).
30 Jauch, H. and Keet, D. (1996), A SATUCC Study on Export Processing Zones in
Southern Africa: Economic, Social and Political Implications, Cape Town, Inter-
national Labour Research and Information Group.
31 Jourdan, P., Gordhan, K., Arkwright, D. and De Beer, G. (1996), ‘Spatial Develop-
ment Initiatives (Development Corridors): Their Potential Contribution to
Investment and Employment Creation’, working paper, Development Bank of
Southern Africa, Midrand, October.
32 Emblematic is the Coega SDI, as described in Bond, P. (2000), ‘Economic Growth,
Ecological Modernization, or Environmental Justice?: Conflicting Discourses in
Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, (11)1.
Chapter 2 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 53
33 Keet, D. (1999), ‘Globalization or Regionalisation: Contradictory Tendencies?

Counteractive Tactics? Or Strategic Possibilities?’, working paper, Institute for
Global Dialogue, Johannesburg, June.
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 54
CHAPTER THREE
Bretton Woods bankruptcies in

Southern Africa
1. Introduction
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are exceptional
institutions, both for their size and for the international financial flows that
they influence. The World Bank together with three affiliated development-
bank institutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America employ 17 000 staff in
170 offices, with $500 billion in capital and $50 billion in annual lending
(more than two-thirds of which is directed to just 11 large countries). The
IMF is even more influential.
The IMF and World Bank have played decisive roles in various facets of
South and Southern African development since the 1950s. Their influence
has ranged from the way in which particular very large projects were
financed, to the design of national programmes and policies under the
influence of the agencies’ neo-liberal ‘Washington Consensus’ ideology, to
the reshaping of the global economy under conditions of extreme financial
volatility. Most Southern African countries know the phenomenon of IMF
and World Bank ‘missions’ jetting in, often for as little as two weeks, to
draft ‘aides memoire’ (often suspiciously similar to those of the countries
previously visited). Sometimes with fanfare, sometimes without, they
pronounce on macroeconomic and social policies, establish huge develop-
ment schemes and gain the ears of the most important state and business
elites, simply because of the institutional prestige they carry.
This prestige is meant to translate into access to international financial
markets for otherwise unattractive debtor nations. Indeed, without an IMF
‘seal of approval’ in the form of a structural adjustment programme, it is
virtually impossible for countries to borrow on a medium- or long-term
basis from commercial markets. The visiting missions are also able to
marshall the very best data available and hire the best local consultants.
Regardless, therefore, of whether one approves or disapproves of
IMF/World Bank ideology, methods and results, they cannot be ignored.
But the lack of socio-economic and environmental progress in Southern
African economies since the IMF and World Bank became qualitatively
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 55
B RETTON W OODS BANKRUPTCIES IN S OUTHERN A FRICA 55
more powerful in the early 1980s has generated some fierce debates
amongst intellectuals. Three competing lines of argument usually emerge:
1) The IMF/World Bank perspective in Southern Africa aims to establish
‘sound macroeconomic policy’; to follow market processes rather than
resisting them; to halt ‘rentier’ (parasitic) activity by bureaucrats;
to promote sensible investments and policies that alleviate poverty,
enhance the role of women in development, and promote environ-
mental sustainability; and thereby contribute to efficient, effective gov-
ernance.
2) IMF/World Bank interventions are typically necessary, if insufficient, for
helping Southern Africa to engage the global economy; for utilising
regulated markets to achieve ‘sustainable’ financial and environmental
development; and for sending signals to the international community
that foreign investment is welcome. However, IMF/World Bank policy,
programmes and projects sometimes are badly phased; appear to be
‘one-size-fits-all’ in character (because they fail to take local conditions
into account); and cause social and environmental problems which must
then be mitigated through additional programmes.
3) The IMF/World Bank agenda has been – and continues to be – disas-
trous for Southern Africa, for it imposes eurocentric notions of
development and modernity; downgrades democracy by propping up
friendly authoritarian regimes; serves transnational corporate and
banking interests above all else; values people and nature less than
(narrowly defined) economic growth; hurts women, disabled people and
the vulnerable in society far more than other social sectors; amplifies an
already exceptionally unequal distribution of wealth; and often leads to
economic disaster, even on its own limited terms.
Contrasting these three positions is important at the outset of the

21st century, in part because the possibility of a world state has become
more important as a subject for debate than ever before. The IMF and
World Bank are the most important embryos of global government, by all
accounts, and – along with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – they
have come under withering attack by critics from both left and right
(as I will show in Chapter five and Part four). Important movements
from both ends of the spectrum have called for the abolition of these
institutions.
Evidence from Southern Africa of IMF/World Bank help and hindrance
has already been influential in the global debates. However, several inter-
esting local personalities have influenced the IMF and World Bank in turn.
In recent years, these have included the following people:1
Stanley Fischer: born in Zambia, raised in Bulawayo and Cape Town,
former World Bank chief economist and IMF deputy-managing director
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 56
associated with 1980s structural adjustment design and late 1990s

financial crisis management;
Bernard Chidzero: Zimbabwean finance minister during the 1980s and
early 1990s, main promoter of Zimbabwean structural adjustment, and
suave chairperson of the IMF/World Bank development committee
(ironically called ‘The Committee on the Transfer of Real Resources to
the Developing Countries’) during the late 1980s period when North-
South net funding-flows were reversed;
Geoffrey Lamb: former SA Communist Party intellectual and University
of Sussex radical academic, then key advisor to World Bank presidents
on making African structural adjustment appear ‘homegrown’, and
subsequently the main World Bank representative in Europe;
Caroline Moser: as an academic at the University of London, the main
World Bank gender critic, founder of ‘Gender and Development’
strategies to replace World Bank ‘Women in Development’ theory, and
then, as World Bank staffperson in the 1990s, a key inside promoter of
‘social capital’ investment;
Trevor Manuel: once advocate of anti-apartheid financial sanctions and
strong critic of the IMF/World Bank, then SA minister of finance and
sponsor of Bank involvement in SA macroeconomic policy, and then
chairperson of the IMF/World Bank board of governors at the
controversial meetings held in 2000 (including in Prague, where two
days of sessions had to be truncated to one because of protests
outside);
Ian Goldin: former anti-draft activist during apartheid, and later chief
economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
and managing director of the Development Bank of Southern Africa
(where, notoriously, he refused a key municipality a loan for expanded
water supply but lent a private company a much larger amount,
apparently to push the privatisation agenda), prior to becoming senior
policy advisor to the World Bank’s chief economist in 2001; and
Mamphela Ramphele: former vice-chancellor at the University of Cape
Town (where she successfully broke the National Education, Health and
Allied Workers Union in the process of cutting the wages of menial
workers in half), and from mid-2000 the World Bank’s managing direc-
tor responsible for human development.
On the other side of the global class struggle at the turn of the century were
leaders like poet Dennis Brutus, Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu
Ndungane, former Soweto city councillor Trevor Ngwane (fired from the
ANC for opposing a World Bank-influenced municipal privatisation
programme), sociologist Fatima Meer (the first official biographer of
Nelson Mandela), liberation theologian Molefe Tsele, and student leader
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 57
Molly Dhlamini.2 All were anti-apartheid activists, subsequently associated

with Jubilee South Africa. During the late 1990s, they quickly gained status
as amongst the most respected international voices arguing for an end to
debt, to structural adjustment and even to the IMF and World Bank as
determinants of Southern African development.
Given the diversity of experiences, views and strategies amongst the
contending forces, there is no short-term hope of resolving Southern
African debates on the merits of the IMF, the World Bank and the foreign
debt that invariably accompanies them. Nevertheless, these topics offer us
an outstanding window on broader problems of development, and on
debating perspectives that are increasingly becoming universal. This chap-
ter considers first the basic historical and institutional characteristics of the
IMF and World Bank, and puts their huge increase in power into the
context of rising Third World debt since the 1970s. I will then consider
examples of controversial World Bank project lending, using the examples
of huge dams at Kariba in Zimbabwe/Zambia (1950s) and Lesotho (1980s-
present). During the 1980s–90s, the IMF/World Bank’s more general
influence over economic development strategies grew dramatically, as
recent Southern African experiences demonstrate.
2. From Bretton Woods to the debt crisis

The Bretton Woods institutions were founded in mid-1944, at the hotel of
the same name in rural New Hampshire, in the north-eastern US, where
representatives of 44 Western-oriented countries, including South Africa,
met to establish global economic rules for the post-war era. The deal was
brokered by Harry Dexter White from the US Treasury and British econo-
mist John Maynard Keynes (who later wrote of his extreme disappointment
that the US won so many concessions). The World Bank was designed to
provide reconstruction support to war-damaged Europe and subsequently
to other countries, while the IMF was mandated to smooth disruptions in
international financial relations between countries. (A few years later in
fascist-ruled Cuba, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT]
was initiated, and in 1995 was renamed the World Trade Organisation.)3
Financial crisis and clout

The shift in global political and economic power that elevated the IMF and
World Bank to their present exalted status occurred, as I discussed in
Chapter one, in the immediate aftermath of the Third World debt crisis
(specifically, the Mexican near-default of 1982), but the roots of global
financial turbulence are found in the 1960s, when national controls on
banking were eroded.4 The geographical expansion of finance in the 1960s
was ratified by further internationalisation of productive capital led by
transnational corporations. Although some researchers argue that
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 58
international financiers merely follow TNCs into new markets, banks exert
strong influence over TNCs in the normal course of business, in part
through a wide range of services: the financing of foreign subsidiaries; the
placing of medium-term Eurocredits and Eurobonds; the international
management of liquid assets and foreign exchange risks; leasing services;
consultation on finance and computing; and maintaining teams of industrial
experts capable of making technical assessments of investment projects.5
Indeed, by 1978, through such services and other command mechanisms,
banks ‘controlled’ 125 of the 487 leading companies in the world, up from
64 in 1965, according to one scholar.6 As the recessions of the 1970s
affected more and more economies, geographic shifts of funds followed the
higher profitability of larger TNCs relative to smaller firms in what had
become a unitary global economy.
As I discussed in Chapter one, the ‘overaccumulation’ of productive
capital had become a global phenomenon by this stage, as excessive capital
intensity in production had generated far more output than could be
absorbed through regular market channels. Corporate resources were rein-
vested less in overproductive manufacturing firms, given rising excess
capacity and declining rates of profit in the G-7 countries (from 20–30%
levels during the 1960s–70s to 5–15% during the 1970s–90s).7 Instead, they
were increasingly funnelled into the financial circuit of capital through a
variety of new international routes. The world’s two-dozen largest banks
controlled most of the action, granting three-quarters of the total amount of
loans to Third World borrowers. It was convenient that concentration
existed on the borrowing side as well: three-quarters of the credit of all
lenders went to fewer than a dozen large Third World and newly indus-
trialised countries. The Eurodollar market hence grew from $50 billion in
1973 to more than $2 trillion 15 years later, and in addition to European
banking centres, was increasingly located in unregulated hot-money
centres, e.g. the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong and the Bahamas. Along with
‘petrodollars’ centralised in New York banks mainly from Arab oil-produc-
ing states, the Eurodollars required an outlet, hence new explorations for
borrowers further afield, including in the Third World.8
If part of the pressure to free global financial flows from national
controls came from the internationalisation of productive capital, of equal
importance were changing monetary conditions in the US. Consistent prob-
lems with the US balance of payments (BoP) followed expenditures on the
Vietnam War and the Great Society (the BoP deficit tripled from 1957 to
1970), and left foreign traders less willing to hold dollars – previously the
currency to which all others were pegged – and to turn to gold instead. As
a result, US gold stocks fell from $24.6 billion – 70% of the world’s supply
– in 1949, to $20.6 billion in 1958 and to $10 billion in 1971. Justifying
President Richard Nixon’s decision to withdraw from the Bretton Woods
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 59
system of fixed exchange rates in 1971 (which cost foreign holders of

dollars an estimated $80 billion), John Connally, Nixon’s treasury secretary,
commented, ‘We had a problem and we are sharing it with the world just
like we shared our prosperity … That’s what friends are for.’
Sharing the problem

As a result, the dollar devalued steadily. A US BoP deficit of $6.9 billion for
1972, up from $2.7 billion in 1971, caused a great stir, and the dollar
collapsed when that (now-seemingly trivial) deficit was announced in
March 1973. Having decisively broken arrangements for international
monetary stability, the US installed the ‘flexible exchange rate system’ still
in place today. As a result, in monetary struggles against other advanced
capitalist countries, Washington found ways of keeping the gold price
relatively low, forcing instead an upward revaluation of the currencies of
other countries.9
In this way, a correcting mechanism for the US trade imbalance was
temporarily found to ease the first major global monetary crisis in four
decades. The revaluation of other currencies – resulting from what the US
called its ‘Passive Strategy for the Balance of Payments’ – moved the
inflationary implications of the US deficit to other countries.10 The struggle
over which relatively weaker parts of the world would bear the pain of
devaluation was in large part played out in important IMF policy changes.
Along with Eastern Europe, which also took on massive debt from
1975–95, the Third World was the weakest part of the global system.
Because the petrodollar deposits were generally short-term and thus cost-
sensitive, the banks insisted that the Third World sovereign loans be taken
on a floating-rate basis. From late 1979, as world interest rates soared, this
became an enormous predicament for the Third World. Still, some
commercial banks found ways to profit from the crisis.
Profiting from pain and corruption

Borrowers had been offered loans during the 1970s at a premium (often
2%) far above the London Interbank Offering Rate, the rate at which inter-
national banks lend each other short-term funds. The banks charged syndi-
cation fees as well as high fees (typically 1–2%) when, after the repayment
burden became unmanageable in the early 1980s, debt rescheduling was
necessary. The banks also gained from the rebound of funds, popularly
known as ‘capital flight’, to the same banks’ VIP deposit accounts. Finally,
the ability of the US banks to take advantage of their foreign branches,
which were beyond the reach of bank regulators, brought a higher profit
rate. Had the banks been lending the foreign deposits to domestic US
customers, they would have had to keep 12% of the assets in a reserve fund
for liquidity purposes. Not having to do so meant another 0.5% on their
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 60
profit margins. So in fact, prior to expensive increases in loan-loss reserve

funds in mid-1987, the banks actually gained from the disaster of the Third
World debt crisis.11
Then the threat of mass default suddenly emerged, as 33 countries found
themselves in need of foreign-debt rescheduling during the early 1980s.12
To this end, the IMF financed the repayment of commercial bank loans in
exchange for a change in development strategy demanding an export
orientation and an end to various state subsidies, especially in social
spending.13 The World Bank stepped in later in the decade when the IMF’s
credibility ran out and its funding became temporarily scarce, expanding
from individual project loans to fully fledged structural-adjustment
financing using 25% of its resources. The funds of the two institutions were
regularly topped up by member governments, which allowed the borrow-
ing countries to repay the commercial banks and hence shift the costs of
devaluing the overaccumulated financial capital from New York, London,
Frankfurt, Zurich and Tokyo onto both taxpayers of the advanced capital-
ist countries and Third World peasants, workers and environments.
How did all of this look from the perspective of Third World borrowers?
Commercial banks didn’t mind how the money was spent, and as a result,
corruption was an integral component of Third World borrowing.
Examples include Haiti, where the Duvallier family’s estimated theft was
$500 million; Zaire (since renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo),
where Mobutu Sese Seko is thought to have been illegitimately worth
$5 billion; the Philippines, where Cory Aquino accused Ferdinand Marcos
of having stolen tens of billions of dollars, while her government inherited
a foreign debt of $36 billion; and Mexico, where even the liberal President
Lopez Portillo apparently took $1 billion with him in 1982 to his retirement
in Italy.14
But even where the borrowers included relatively more democratic
governments, economic calculations associated with debt quickly went
askew. The dollar’s depreciation and generalised inflation made interest
rates on international loans appear negative in real terms (i.e. after inflation)
throughout the 1970s. Most Third World countries outside East Asia were
suffering from a slow-down in investment, as a function of their own local
overaccumulation crises. In order to industrialise or otherwise cope with
problems of underdevelopment, many national leaders saw loans as a way
out of dependency on the First World. Various earlier development paths –
especially those based on direct foreign investment and import substitution
– had not proven successful even on their own limited terms.
The main reason was slowing demand in the world economy, as a result
of global overaccumulation and conservative policy responses in advanced
economies under the Thatcher, Reagan and Kohl governments that were
aimed at weakening organised labour through the imposition of austerity.
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 61
One overarching strategy – ‘monetarism’ – emerged to support currencies,

to rid economies of inflation and in the process to lower costs associated
with First World labour – by increasing unemployment rates – and Third
World commodities. Extremely high interest rates were introduced by the
Labour government in Britain under IMF influence in 1976, and fully
cemented on a global scale by the US Federal Reserve Board in late 1979.15
The interest-rate increase raised the repayment burden of Third World
debtor nations to impossible levels. The fragility of the advanced capitalist
banking system was thus exposed and exacerbated. Accumulation was
pushed into spatial and temporal outlets which would prove untenable.16
The implications of crisis displacement

The next step was for Third World borrowers to confront the limits of their
earning capacities. This was not purely a function of the limits of Third
World accumulation, but can be traced to the continuing crisis in the
advanced industrial world. Following a bout of extreme commodity-price
inflation in the early 1970s, a series of recessions in advanced industrial
economies led to a reorganisation in the cost structures, and sometimes the
industrial compositions themselves, of the primary exports of the
beleaguered debtor nations. This resulted in a 77% decline in world prices
of non-petroleum commodities from 1973 to 1988 (which was the key period
of crisis formation), while global real interest rates rose from –4% to 4%.17
By the 1980s, the policies of the IMF and World Bank had exacerbated
these structural changes, as all countries were not only compelled to shift
towards export-led growth strategies (which exacerbated the global
commodity gluts in the process), but also to adopt a standard range of neo-
liberal structural adjustment policies: fiscal constraints – especially social-
subsidy cuts – privatisation, trade and financial liberalisation, the
deregulation of their labour markets and higher interest rates. Prior to
investigating the application of these policies in selected Southern Africa
cases (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique), we should consider the
other key role of the World Bank in Third World development, namely
project finance. Two large dam complexes – Kariba and the Lesotho
Highlands Water Project (LHWP) – illustrate the problems.
3. Shaping Southern African development

While the IMF was, until the 1970s, largely a technical agency whose aim
was to keep the international balance sheets of individual countries in sync,
in contrast the World Bank looked far and wide for opportunities to
provide project loans. Initially the World Bank confined itself to European
reconstruction, but during the 1950s it became the largest foreign financier
to several Southern African colonies then still under minority rule, includ-
ing the Central African Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland (later
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 62
renamed Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi), South Africa and Portuguese-

ruled Angola and Mozambique. By all accounts, World Bank projects were
not aimed at furthering the causes of racial equality, economic justice and
ecological sustainability but, on the contrary, promoted white-controlled
infrastructure for the benefit of extractive, exploitative white economic
interests and relatively wealthy white consumers. Witness the two huge dam
complexes financed by the World Bank on the Zambezi River and in the
Lesotho Highlands.18
Kariba power
During the mid-1950s, the then-largest World Bank project (at a total cost
of $80 million) was the huge Kariba hydro-electric dam on the Zambezi
River border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Because of its size, complex-
ity and the controversy associated with its development, Kariba deserves
some specific consideration.19 The dam created one of the world’s largest
inland bodies of water, generated massive amounts of hydro-electricity, and
spawned the birth of major tourism and fishing industries in what
previously had been an undeveloped area. But in the process, 56 000 Tonga
(Batonka) people were summarily displaced from ancestral lands and lost
their livelihoods without compensation, and many of them died because of
degraded resettlement conditions.
One source of electricity demand in colonial Zimbabwe was white
business and suburban consumption, which was enhanced by the World
Bank’s earlier $28-million electrification loan in 1952. But far greater
demand for Kariba energy was emerging from Zambian copper-field expan-
sion by South African, British and US multinational mining corporations.
‘Their role in the (regional) economy’ was, according to historian Colin
Leys, ‘in itself decisive and it is not too much to say that the meetings of
their boards of directors can be as important for the inhabitants of the
Federation as those of the Federal cabinet.’20 Hence the World Bank’s
Kariba loan catered for these interests, instead of those of the vast majority
of Zimbabweans and Zambians.
However, when the World Bank underestimated (by 50%) the money
that would be required to build Kariba, the two main beneficiaries – Anglo
American and Roan Selection Trust, together with their allied financiers the
British South Africa Co., Standard Chartered World Bank and Barclays
Bank – were approached by the Federation governor to provide a substan-
tial top-up loan to the project, on the grounds that with copper prices
soaring during the mid-1950s, the firms were enjoying a windfall they
should share. The resulting credit was nearly as large as the World Bank’s
contribution, and had the effect of diverting revenues that would have at
least partially been available for use in Zambia, causing severe strains in
intra-Federation relations. According to a World Commission on Dams
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 63
investigation into Kariba in 1999, the top-up loan ‘stole funds from the
Zambian government … Zambia was seeking funding for a large rural
development programme long discussed and promised to reverse the accel-
erated flow of rural people into the mining towns and along the line of rail’,
which the copper companies subsequently refused to support because they
had extended the Kariba credit.21
Another financing-related criticism of Kariba emerged in an official
expert-committee report in 1962, which noted the government’s over-
reliance on foreign-denominated loans from the World Bank, the US
Export-Import World Bank and the Commonwealth Development
Corporation. This financing method had generated ‘special problems in the
negotiation and amortisation of such loans, which may make them an
unsuitable vehicle for financing projects promising a return only in the
distant future. In the case of such capital expenditures, the obligation of
paying interest and the repayment of capital may become too burden-
some’.22
Indeed, the danger of foreign-currency loans for developmental
purposes was made by Rhodesian economist John Handford: ‘One of the
loans that had helped to build Kariba – that by the British Common-
wealth Development Corporation – proved somewhat expensive, be-
cause the interest payable on it was linked to the price of money by being
1% higher than the British Bank Rate. Thus, when recurring financial
crises in Britain led to raising of the Bank Rate, the cost of the loan also
rose.’23
The mismatch of lending – namely, foreign-currency obligations to pay
for local-currency assets – bedeviled not only Kariba, but became one of the
most important factors in the subsequent Third World debt crisis when
global interest rates soared, and continues to raise questions as to the merits
of large project-financing deals to pay for inputs such as dam cement, steel
and locally remunerated labour that can be acquired using domestic
currency.
Even where the World Bank was more inclined to consider the develop-
mental condition of indigenous majority populations, it again readily
adopted the colonial point of view, such as in Zimbabwe, where another
major loan, again denominated in hard currency, was aimed at implement-
ing the Native Land Husbandry Act of 1959. This law imposed alien
individual-ownership title systems on African communal lands, thus gener-
ating sufficient peasant protest to halt the process. Displacement appeared
under colonial logic as a means of accelerating economic development: ‘We
do not want native peasants’, Garfield Todd (a future prime minister) told
parliament during the early 1950s, ‘We want the bulk of them working in
the mines and farms and in the European areas and we could absorb them
and their families.’24 Cheryl Payer concluded that the World Bank-funded
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 64
law ‘was designed in part to provide white industrialists with a captive

labour force by denying migrant labour the right to return to land in the
reserves’.25
Notwithstanding the technical, social and environmental problems
caused by loans for Kariba, rural land tenure and other projects, the under-
lying rationale for the World Bank’s involvement in what was then Southern
Rhodesia and the rest of the region was to integrate Southern Africa into
world financial circuits. After a two-week visit by a World Bank public-
relations officer in 1956, a leading business journal observed that, ‘The two
note-books full of notes which he had made on the trip would be used both
internally by the World Bank, and as a source of information for use by
Swiss, USA and other financial interests.’26
Lesotho water 27
In South Africa, the World Bank’s history was just as controversial, for it
began developing business plans just two years after apartheid was
formally introduced in 1948, and the World Bank’s first loans –
$30 million to Eskom and $20 million for railways and harbours – were
granted in 1951. Follow-up loans of $162 million for both projects con-
tinued until 1968. Indeed, in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960,
when the sanctions movement gathered steam, the World Bank granted
loans worth $45 million to Pretoria, including $20 million in 1966 after
then-ANC president Albert Luthuli and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had
called for financial sanctions against apartheid. There was no direct bene-
fit for black consumers who, because of apartheid, were denied Eskom
power that had been financed by the World Bank and whose prospects of
rail transport were mainly linked to their employment – if they possessed a
pass-book – in urban centres. The World Bank discontinued lending to
South Africa when the last Eskom loan (for a coal-fired power station) was
repaid, because per capita GDP rose to levels that disqualified access by
Pretoria.28
However, the World Bank still contributed to apartheid through the
Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which dammed rivers and tunnelled
through mountains to supply water to thirsty Johannesburg customers –
mainly wealthy households, white-owned farms and white-owned mines –
notwithstanding huge social and environmental costs. The loan was signed
in October 1986, following a Pretoria-sponsored coup which ousted
Lesotho prime minister Leabua Jonathan. This was at a time of harsh
repression in South Africa, after the foreign debt repayment ‘standstill’ of
September 1985, when there was little chance of South Africa getting access
to fresh foreign funds.29 Lesotho – with its $600 per-capita income and its
reliance on foreign aid for 20% of its GDP – was granted a World Bank
loan of $110 million, solely because of South Africa’s ability to stand surety.
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 65
(In fact, the only financial risk analysis in the World Bank’s initial report
was concerned with whether Pretoria would default.) The LHWP loan
came to be described as ‘sanctions busting’ by the first ANC water minis-
ter, Kader Asmal (though he later expanded the project, in the face of
strong community protest).30
As with Kariba, the LHWP was Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest-ever public-
works project. The first phase alone, costing $4 billion, involved construc-
tion of two dams and cross-catchment tunnels which will supply an
additional billion cubic metres of water to Johannesburg (for which annual
royalties of $50 million will be paid), as well as hydro-electricity to Lesotho.
Water ordinarily draining into the Orange River catchment area is now
being diverted through the mountains to the Vaal River in order to supply
the continent’s largest industrial complex, raising important social,
environmental and economic concerns. Indigenous communities in
Lesotho are witnessing large-scale displacement affecting 20 000 people,
loss of common resources like grazing land, topsoil and woodlots, loss of
income through land submersion, and flooding of ancestral burial grounds
(for which reimbursement and resettlement schemes were considered
unsatisfactory by a majority of residents, according to surveys in the late
1990s). There was also an increase in social problems consequent to dam
construction, including a dramatic increase in AIDS, alcohol abuse and
livestock theft. Under pressure from local church groups and international
NGOs, the World Bank and South African officials have been involved in
resettlement and compensation. But rural development programmes were
mired in corruption, as was the management of the Lesotho side of the
project (it was alleged that the Basothu chief executive officer of the
LHWP, Musapha Sole, was provided with bribes from some of the largest
construction companies in the world, including ABB of Switzerland,
Impregilio of Italy and Dumez of France, over a ten-year period).31
The environmentalist critique has also been difficult to resolve. The
LHWP exacerbates Lesotho’s scarcity of cultivated land (only 9% of the
country can be used for farming), hence pushing peasants onto soil more
vulnerable to erosion. The dams also destroy crucial habitats of the Maluti
minnow (an endangered species), the bearded vulture and four other
species considered ‘globally threatened’. Moreover, early LHWP feasibility
studies failed to include an environmental-impact assessment; linings for
tunnels were inadequate and had to be cemented; reservoir-induced earth-
quakes were far worse than anticipated; and soil erosion and sedimentation
– which typically lower dam capacity by 1% per year and silt up intake
areas – were not initially taken into account. Lesotho’s own access to water
has also become a matter of concern, with experts now certain that there is
insufficient water in the country to share with South Africa beyond the still-
planned LHWP Phase 2, and within ten to thirty years, Lesotho would
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 66
itself probably face a condition of water scarcity.32 The capital city, Maseru,
suffered a serious water shortage in late 1999, for example.
There was also a consumer critique of the LHWP, especially the World
Bank’s role, from Soweto and Alexandra township residents, who argued
that the financing of the project makes water provision to low-income black
residents of Johannesburg more, not less, difficult. The World Bank’s
estimates in the mid-1980s of anticipated demand in the Witwatersrand
area (now Gauteng Province) were, by task manager John Roome’s own
estimation, higher by 40% than actual consumption in the late 1990s,
which meant that the first Lesotho water destined for the Vaal in early 1998
had to be redirected back to the Lesotho lowlands. In 1995, approximately
1.5 million residents of Gauteng did not have direct access to water, and to
supply them with 50 litres per person per day would have required only
22 million cubic metres of additional supply annually, representing a small
fraction of the water that middle- and upper-income consumers used to
water gardens and fill swimming pools. The LHWP’s first two phases will
supply a billion more cubic meters of water to Gauteng each year.33
Furthermore, in addition to hedonistic water use by wealthy consumers,
a vast proportion of incoming water – approximately half in most town-
ships – leaks out of Gauteng’s apartheid-era infrastructure, which black
households are expected to pay for. The possibilities for conservation not
only from fixing infrastructure but imposing limits on suburban household
and industrial consumption were estimated by some credible officials at
40%. But the LHWP water-distribution structure meant that the main
catchment-area intermediary (the Rand Water Board), which should have
been in a position to fix leaks and promote conservation through ‘demand
side management’, had the reverse incentive, namely to charge municipali-
ties for high-level consumption in order to make payments on LHWP inter-
est charges. Therefore, given limited municipal resources, the expectation
was that the leaks would not be fixed. As a result, for consumers to pay for
the LHWP would mean raising the marginal price of water dramatically
(the World Bank suggested by a factor of five once Phase 1B is complete,
to accurately reflect cost increases). Moreover, while bulk-water charges to
municipalities rose by 35% between 1995 and 1998 mainly because of the
LHWP, the levy for the first block of the Johannesburg block tariff, i.e. the
lowest block, increased by 55%, indicating that, relatively speaking, first-
block consumers paid a higher proportion of the increase than did
consumers who used more water.34
For Gauteng township consumers who could not pay their bills, water cut-
offs soon began to occur, following Roome’s suggestion made in 1995 that a
‘credible threat of cutting service’ was needed to discipline residents who
continued the municipal payments boycotts begun during the 1980s.35 In
contrast to the apartheid era, in which water cut-offs were extremely rare – in
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 67
part because of strong opposition from civic movements – 1997 witnessed

more than a ten-fold increase in water cut-offs in Gauteng, and a decline from
50% to 20% in the proportion of those who were cut off who subsequently
reconnected. The rate of water cut-offs intensified further in 1998, with
entire townships disconnected in some cases, including individual house-
holds who had paid their bills. The LHWP-related increases in the price of
water were the main cause of the inability to pay, but when Alexandra
residents went to the World Bank Inspection Panel to object that the burden
of LHWP financing fell on low-income people, it rejected the complaint.36
Nevertheless, the communities continued struggling, and were vindi-
cated in late 2000 when the World Commission on Dams analysed
problems associated with big dams in much the same way that they did. The
LHWP violated so many of the commission’s recommendations that
Lesotho peasant representatives and Gauteng township leaders together
called for a moratorium on further LHWP construction (a call which was
ignored in both Pretoria and Washington).
The Kariba and LHWP projects are revealing because of their size, the
enhancement of inegalitarian status-quo power relations that result from
them, and their enormous impact on the relationship between society and
nature. But the Bretton Woods institutions were most decisive in Southern
Africa when it came to Washington Consensus economic policies. These
reflected leverage enjoyed through financing relationships, ranging from
particular project credits to more general structural/sectoral adjustment
loans.
4. From projects to policy in Southern Africa

As the Third World debt crisis became more difficult to manage, and as the
efficacy of major project loans began to be questioned, the IMF and World
Bank shifted their attention to macroeconomic management aimed first at
ensuring repayment of external debts. Although political relationships with
newly liberated countries, with sometimes radical-sounding nationalist
governments, were not easy, the role of the Bretton Woods institutions in
Southern Africa was not qualitatively different than elsewhere in the world.
Most importantly, increasing IMF/World Bank funding and influence did
not solve debt and economic crises, but often deepened them. Even
countries that did not agree to externally imposed adjustment policies, like
war-torn Angola, relatively prosperous Botswana and South Africa, still
gave the IMF ‘policy undertakings’ – under the threat of losing inter-
national credit-worthiness, and therefore access to hard currency, without
the IMF’s seal of approval.
The widespread failure of IMF/World Bank structural adjustment
programmes across Southern Africa, and indeed across the world, is not
disputed. As I have indicated above, central to the global crisis was the
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 68
IMF/ World Bank strategy of pushing every Third World country to export
more, resulting in declining prices and rising debt burdens. But the partic-
ular way in which Southern African economies – Mozambique, Zimbabwe
and South Africa, for example – were restructured during the 1980s–90s
deserves brief attention.
South Africa turns neo-liberal

The wealthiest country in the region, South Africa, reflects a profound
contradiction in its relations with the IMF and World Bank. Without a
substantial lending relationship, the Bretton Woods institutions have never-
theless been extremely influential in determining South Africa’s economic
and social policies.37 To consider the IMF first, its advisors had a central
role during annual visits in the apartheid government’s shift in the late
1980s towards neo-liberal economic strategies, resulting in very high real
interest rates (from –7% in 1987 to +6% in 1989), privatisation (Iscor),
export-oriented growth strategies and the implementation of the regressive
Value Added Tax (which led to a two-day strike by 3.5 million workers).
In previous years, the IMF had ignored international condemnations of
apartheid and the financial sanctions campaign. During the late 1970s and
early 1980s, in the wake of the Soweto uprising, the IMF lent $2 billion to
Pretoria just as international anti-apartheid activists began persuading
commercial banks to boycott Pretoria. In 1983, the US Congress forbade
further IMF loans to the apartheid regime after anti-apartheid pressure
increased.
Despite this history, leading economists of the African National Congress
believed that the legitimacy associated with the IMF was required for a
democratic South Africa to access international financial markets. In
December 1993, the first act of the Transitional Executive Committee (a
government-in-waiting combining the ANC and the ruling National Party)
was to borrow $850 million from the IMF, ostensibly for drought relief,
although the drought had ended 18 months earlier. The loan’s secret con-
ditions were leaked to Business Day in March 1994, presumably to establish
confidence in financial markets that the election in April 1994 and the
subsequent transfer of power would be characterised by continuity in
economic policy. These conditions included not only items from the classic
structural-adjustment menu (lower import tariffs, cuts in state spending,
large cuts in public-sector wages, etc.), but also informal but intense
pressure by IMF managing director Michel Camdessus to reappoint both
finance minister Derek Keys and Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals, the
two main stalwarts of National Party neo-liberalism.
The World Bank’s re-entry into South Africa was far more subtle. In May
1990, shortly after F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC, World Bank staff
began to woo critics both from the internal Mass Democratic Movement
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 69
and those from within the exiled ANC. The World Bank conceded its
‘strongly negative image, particularly among ANC cadres who viewed the
World Bank through the lens of their experience in other African countries
undergoing structural adjustment’.38 Sensitivities were initially addressed
by World Bank team leader Geoffrey Lamb (the former SA Communist
Party intellectual), who set up specialist teams to analyse conditions and
generate policy options in macroeconomics, industry, health, education,
housing and land reform from 1991 to 1994.
The World Bank agreed, apparently reluctantly, that there would be no
loans to the De Klerk government.39 The World Bank earnestly desired
legitimacy from working with the incoming ANC government (Nelson
Mandela was periodically fêted in Washington during the early and mid-
1990s by World Bank and IMF leaders), and it saw South Africa as an ideal
place to establish the function now termed the ‘Knowledge Bank’.40 Indeed,
the sole World Bank loan to the first democratic South African government
– worth just R340 million (although in fact only around half that amount
was actually used) – was only granted in 1997, for the purpose of making
small and medium enterprises more globally competitive.41 This reflected,
in part, the power of social movements and Pretoria’s difficulty in justifying
foreign-sourced financing for development in a context of highly liquid
domestic financial sources.
The real impact of the World Bank in post-apartheid South Africa was
therefore witnessed not through lending, but in policy advice: land reform,
housing, healthcare, public works, child-welfare finance, infrastructure,
industrial development and macroeconomic policy. There were no doubt
others, but as the World Bank itself said in 1999, ‘several successful initia-
tives had no formal outputs or public recognition of our role’.42 The most
high-profile initiative, however, was the Growth, Employment and
Redistribution strategy. But this became a severe embarrassment to World
Bank macroeconomic modellers (one of whom, Richard Ketley, subse-
quently left the World Bank to play a crucial role in the Department of
Finance, before continuing, in 2000, to another well-remunerated position
at the Deutsche Bank).43
In addition to World Bank policy advice, two far lower-profile World
Bank subsidiaries – the International Finance Corporation (IFC), its
investment-ownership arm and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee
Agency (MIGA) – were active in South Africa. From 1996, IFC investments
soon topped $100 million (in financial services, pulp and paper,
cement/construction, privatisation of municipal infrastructure, private
healthcare and a Domino’s Pizza franchise, though the latter went bankrupt
in late 2000). MIGA provided tens of millions of dollars in investment
guarantees, as well as supporting SA corporate investment in the con-
troversial Mozal aluminium smelter in Maputo.44
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 70
The World Bank and IMF role in South Africa was obviously highly
controversial, and the effects of structural adjustment were hotly debated
between proponents with widely divergent ideologies. Of the three
discourses about the Bretton Woods institutions noted in the introductory
section earlier in this chapter, the first and third were most in evidence in
South Africa. But experiences in Zimbabwe and Mozambique provide
additional perspectives.
Zimbabwe’s plunge
In Zimbabwe, matters were both more blunt – IMF/ World Bank structural-
adjustment conditionality was not in the least disguised, as I will show
below, particularly when Zimbabwe became desperate for foreign exchange
in 1999 – and far more complicated. Indeed, a full interpretation of IMF and
World Bank policy roles entails not only an assessment of the failed struc-
tural adjustment programme of the 1990s, but also of a variety of other
sectoral- and project-loan interventions dating back to the early 1980s. But
the main lesson to be learned from Zimbabwe relates to the second of the
three discourses noted at the outset: the origins of the view that IMF/World
Bank structural-adjustment policies are ‘necessary but insufficient’.
In its oppositional statement about an alternative to adjustment, even the
Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) posed a crucial limitation on
its own future strategies, namely that ‘there can be no return to pre-ESAP
policies, partly because of the stranglehold that foreign creditors have on
policy through the substantial debt that has accumulated, paradoxically,
because of the failure of the policy’. As ZCTU leader Morgan Tsvangirai
put it in his preface to the ZCTU publication, Beyond ESAP: ‘While
acknowledging that SAPs are necessary, the study shows that they are in-
sufficient in fostering development.’45 (A more traditional labour discourse
would have generated the affirmation that ESAP was unnecessary and
indeed that it underdeveloped Zimbabwe during the 1990s.)
To comprehend this apparent concession to orthodox ideology, and the
overwhelming material and financial power of the IMF/World Bank which
it reflects, some background is necessary. For two decades after independ-
ence in 1980, Zimbabwe suffered an unusual mix of populist government
rhetoric from a nominally ‘Marxist-Leninist’ ruling party; white corporate
domination of the industrial, agricultural, financial and services sectors; and
an inability to break into global markets. President Robert Mugabe steadily
condoned an ever-greater role for the private sector in Zimbabwe’s
development, in the process taking on vast quantities of international debt.
One reason was the role played by finance minister Bernard Chidzero,
who advocated borrowing massively at the outset, in the belief that repay-
ments – which consumed 16% of export earnings in 1983 – would ‘decline
sharply until we estimate it will be about 4% within the next few years’.46
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 71
The World Bank, which lent $700 million to Harare during the 1980s and
made Chidzero head of its ‘Development Committee’, concurred:
‘The debt service ratios should begin to decline after 1984 even with
large amounts of additional external borrowing.’47 In reality, Zimbabwe’s
debt servicing spiralled up to an untenable 35% of export earnings by
1987.
Loan conditions quickly emerged. By 1985, the IMF pressured Mugabe
to cut education and health spending, and in 1986 food subsidies fell to two-
thirds of their levels in 1981. Similarly, land reform was stymied not only by
the 1979 Lancaster House constitution’s ‘willing-seller, willing-buyer’
compromise, but by the World Bank’s alternative to redistribution, i.e.
showering peasants with unaffordable microloans. From a tiny base in 1980,
the World Bank’s main partner agency granted 94 000 loans by 1987. But
without structural change in agricultural markets, the strategy floundered, as
80% of borrowers defaulted in 1988 (good rains notwithstanding).48
Chidzero then persuaded Mugabe to ditch Rhodesian-era regulatory
controls on prices and foreign-trade/financial flows. The Economic
Structural Adjustment Programme, which ran from 1991 to 1995, was
heavily promoted by the World Bank and IMF. The programme failed
decisively, not simply because of two bad droughts in 1992 and 1995. The
overall structure of Zimbabwe’s economy and society left it ill-suited for
rapid liberalisation and its resultant extremely high real interest rates, a
dramatic upsurge in inflation associated with the lifting of price controls
and devastating cuts in social-welfare spending.
Worse, social policy went into reverse gear. As a direct result of funding
cuts and cost-recovery policies, exacerbated by the AIDS pandemic,
Zimbabwe’s brief rise in literacy and health indicators in the 1980s was
dramatically reversed. In contrast, the stock-market reached extraordinary
peaks in mid-1991 and mid-1997, but these were followed by crashes of
more than 50% within a few months, along with massive hikes in interest
rates. Although growth was finally recorded in 1996–97, it quickly expired
when international financial markets and local investors battered
Zimbabwe’s currency from November 1997 onwards, ultimately shrinking
the value of a Z$ from $0.09 to $0.025 over the course of a year. As a result,
unprecedented inflation was imported, leading in January and October
1998 to urban riots over maize and fuel-price hikes.49
As Mugabe stumbled, as economic grievances intensified, as public-
sector employees and other workers increasingly went on strike, and as
evidence of political unaccountability mounted, the ZCTU became more
political. In early 1999, the National Working People’s Convention gave a
strong civil-society endorsement to the formation of an opposition party,
which was formed in September 1999 and was known as the Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC).
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 72
Meanwhile, the IMF sent a high-level team to negotiate the disbursement

of a $53 million loan (which in turn was to release another $800 million
from other donors and lenders). The team’s objectives were straight-
forward. Mugabe was told in August 1998 to reverse the only three progres-
sive things he had done in recent years, namely a ban on holding foreign
exchange accounts in local banks, an import tax imposed on luxuries in
1997 and price controls imposed on staple foods in mid-1998 in the wake
of riots.
Mugabe soon conceded the first point (although he reversed it again in
February 2001 when a forex shortage and petrol crisis compelled the
seizure of forex accounts, for conversion to local currency at an artificially
low rate). As for the second and third points, by March 1999 the IMF
assistant director for Africa, Michael Nowak, was publicly insisting that
Mugabe must ‘reduce the tariffs slapped on luxury goods … and we also
want the government to give us a clear timetable as to when and how they
will remove the price controls they have imposed on some goods’.50
In mid-1999, Nowak agreed to increase the loan amount to $200 million.
But there now new conditions, reflecting general public outrage at the
apparently corrupt use of 12 000 Zimbabwe army troops as a proto-
mercenary force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, through which
Mugabe’s cronies were accumulating vast wealth by protecting diamond
mines from Ugandan-backed rebels. An IMF representative revealed the
character of the negotiations to international journalists: ‘The
Zimbabweans felt offended, shocked, but they all the same agreed to give
us the information, we got all the clarification we wanted. They had no
choice … We have had assurances [that] if there is budgetary overspending,
there will be cuts in other budget sectors.’ (My emphasis.)51
Mugabe’s own confused and confusing reaction included agreeing to the
regressive economic conditions associated with the loan (which he soon
violated, leading to a cut-off of the next tranch). But he also regularly
lambasted the ‘imperialist’ role of the IMF, once telling them to ‘shut up!’.
However, again and again throughout ZANU’s history, Mugabe had
reserved his most revolutionary sounding rhetoric for those occasions when
left-wing political threats appeared (namely, the National Working People’s
Convention and an emerging opposition party). As a US banker observed as
early as 1982, ‘I feel it is a political pattern that Mugabe give radical, anti-
business speeches before government makes pro-business decisions or
announcements.’52
Mugabe’s defeat by Tsvangirai’s movement in a referendum on con-
stitutional reform in February 2000, together with another forex crisis and
petrol shortage, amplified his desperation. To save forex, Mugabe autho-
rised finance minister Herbert Murewa not to repay bank loans in February
2000. Moreover, anxious to retain rural votes in the parliamentary election
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 73
scheduled for June 2000, Mugabe condoned and encouraged land invasions
of more than 20% of Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms. The situation
degenerated into deeper economic crisis and sustained conflict verging on
anarchy.
By October 2000, Zimbabwe had accumulated six months of World
Bank arrears and, desperate to regain access to hard currency, Mugabe
authorised the new technocrat finance minister, Simba Makoni, to begin
paying the World Bank. By paying $50 million, Mugabe hoped for
$140 million in new loans, but this was quite a gamble. Indeed, Zimbabwe
had joined the list of countries like Iraq, Yemen and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo considered to be basket cases. Confusingly, the
opposition MDC spent 2000 calling for both the Zimbabwe Democracy Act
to be passed on Capitol Hill (sponsored mainly by white, conservative
Republicans), which would prohibit new IMF/World Bank loans to
Zimbabwe, and for more IMF/World Bank-type economic programmes.
The contradictions will perhaps be resolved by the presidential election in
2002, but whether the MDC will turn left or right on economic policy if
they win it is still up in the air.53
In sum, Zimbabwe’s post-1997 plunge can, at a superficial level, be
traced to the problems Mugabe himself caused with one political blunder
after another. But it is also more generally a direct outcome of the context
of the early 1990s in which, structurally, his government’s power and his
own decisions were repeatedly limited, conditioned and ultimately reversed
by Washington.54
Mozambique under Washington’s thumb

The ability of the IMF and the World Bank to wield such power becomes
even more obvious when one considers other Southern African countries.
Impoverished Mozambique provides a third example of the way IMF and
World Bank influence is felt in the region, especially in relation to debt
relief, because it was considered to be one of the star pupils of Washington
during the late 1990s, following rigidly conservative monetary policies and
privatising large sections of the economy.55
Mozambique was plunged into deep depression throughout the 1980s, in
part because of ineffective development policies, but mainly because of a
devastating civil war sponsored by first Rhodesia and then Pretoria, costing
approximately one million lives and at least $20 billion in physical destruc-
tion. Facing debt service obligations to international creditors (initially the
Eastern Bloc, and later Western governments and commercial suppliers)
that consumed 93% of export earnings by 1991, Mozambique could
typically afford to repay only a small proportion of the loans (making up
only around 25% of trade inflows), but still far more than the health and
education budgets combined. So the foreign debt of $5.6 billion was ‘rolled
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 74
over’ periodically. In 1998, for example, Mozambique repaid only

$110 million that year.
In 1996, the IMF and World Bank launched their ‘Highly-Indebted Poor
Countries’ initiative, and Mozambique was a high-profile pilot project. But
harsh conditions were attached to the paltry debt relief, as expressed in a
letter sent to President Joaqim Chissano of Mozambique by James
Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, in March 1998. These con-
ditions involved:
the privatisation of municipal water (which required, in a classic public-
squeeze-prior-to-private-profiteering policy, the ‘sharp’ rise in water
tariffs, which were ‘to be increased even further prior to the signing of
management contracts’);
the quintupling of patient fees for public-health services over a five-year
period; and
the privatisation and simultaneous liberalisation of the important
cashew-nut processing industry (which led to the collapse of most
factories and 10 000 job losses – mainly of women – until finally, after
vibrant national debate, the Mozambique parliament reversed the policy
in January 2001).56
A year later, more than 70 new conditions emerged in the next IMF debt-
relief package, including a recommendation that parliament make the tax
structure more regressive (i.e. so that the rich would pay a decreasing share
of their income). At this stage, the IMF used new jargon in applying its neo-
liberal conditionality to the rural water sector, stating that the aim of its
programme was that of ‘transforming the planning and delivery of rural
water and sanitation services from a supply-driven model to a sustained
demand responsive model, characterised by community management, cost
recovery, and the involvement of the private sector’.57 Trendy language
cannot disguise the fact that such a ‘demand responsive model’ was an
increasingly discredited development strategy, having failed dramatically
when applied to rural water projects in far wealthier countries like South
Africa (leading in 2000–01 to tens of thousands of cholera cases). Such cost-
recovery strategies simply don’t work in a country in which 70% of the
population live below the poverty line. Still, for mainly ideological reasons,
the World Bank continued pushing 100% cost-recovery policies on water
projects across Africa, while lobbying African governments ‘to move away
from the concept of free water for all’.58
In 1999, however, increased public pressure against the IMF and World
Bank – including Chissano’s own public frustration over HIPC – led to
slightly greater concessions for Mozambique, and repayments fell to
$73 million and then to $58 million by 2001. Nevertheless, the IMF and
World Bank remained crudely callous towards Mozambique’s grinding
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 75
poverty, and were unmoved even by the floods that devastated Mozambique
in January and February 2000. Instead of providing more debt cancellation,
Washington offered only to reschedule repayment by adding the amount
due that year to the end of the amortisation schedule.
So, for one of the world’s poorest countries, the experience of HIPC
debt relief shows how the combination of international financial power,
unrepayable debt and the Washington Consensus economic philosophy can
be a lethal combination. In part because of experiences such as
Mozambique’s, and in part because the implications of the financial volatil-
ity experienced by Zimbabwe and South Africa were so threatening, an
international movement arose during the 1990s to contest the Bretton
Woods institutions, aiming not only for reforms, but for their complete
closure.
We investigate that social movement in Part four, following discussions
of the South African government’s strategy for reforming the Bretton
Woods twins and the world economy, and the tragic failure to make head-
way against the global apartheid implicit in differential access to HIV-AIDS
treatment. However, a final example of dominance over South Africa by
Washington and its allies should first be considered, namely overseas
development aid.
Notes
1 A key Zimbabwean was Callisto Madavo, who became World Bank vice-president for
Africa. Other South Africans included Hennie van Greuning (former registrar of
banks at the Reserve Bank in Pretoria during a crucial period of deregulation and
financial chaos in the early 1990s), Kam Chetty (once a left-wing Cape Town NGO
activist, then a civil-society fixer for the World Bank’s Pretoria office), Roland White
(former anti-apartheid student leader, later responsible for many of the worst neo-
liberal processes in municipal infrastructure when he worked for the Department of
Finance in Pretoria during the late 1990s), Alan Gelb, a pro-liberalisation trade econo-
mist, and Jeff Rackie, an urban planner, all of whom played damaging roles in South
Africa’s socio-economic development processes in the 1990s. An interesting exception
was that of Ismail Lagardien, former executive committee member of the Azanian
People’s Organisation, then main assistant to Trevor Manuel when he was SA minister
of trade and industry, and then speechwriter for Joseph Stiglitz when as World Bank
chief economist he unveiled the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ critique of the IMF.
2 Amongst other Southern Africans who were highly regarded in the international
activist community were Bishop Bernadino Mandlate from Maputo, Jonah Gokova
and Davie Malungisa from the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development,
Godfrey Kinyenze of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Mauritian activists
Rajni Lallah and Alain Ah-Vee, Zambian economist Opa Kapijimpanga from the
Harare-based African Debt and Development Network, Rosemary Nyerere
Mwamakula and Rogate Mshana from the Tanzania Debt and Development
Coalition and World Council of Churches, and Francis N’Gambi and Michael
Nyirenda of the Malawi Debt and Development Coalition.
In South Africa, other key global-issue activists/strategists included Jubilee
2000’s Neville Gabriel, community/women’s activists Mercia Andrews and
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 76
Lindelwe Nxu, NGO leader Abie Ditlhake, Jubilee South co-ordinator Donna
Andrews, Johannesburg media activist Ashraf Patel, SA Municipal Worker Union
staffers Roger Ronnie, Lance Viotte and Anna Weekes, environmentalists Bobby
Peek, Chris Albertyn, Richard Sherman, Tebogo Phadu, Jessica Wilson and Liane
Greeff, health activist Zackie Achmat and several Alternative Information and
Development Centre associates (Trevor Ngwane, Andrews, Carl Brecker, Brian
Ashley, Dot Keet, Jeff Rudin and George Dor).
Combatting the WTO with extraordinary effectiveness were Mohau Pheko of
the Africa Trade Network in Johannesburg, Kato Lambrechts of the Institute for
Global Dialogue (subsequently Christian Aid), and the brilliant Ugandan political
economist Yash Tandon, based in Harare. Amongst South African labour activists
with international influence were Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi and Ibrahim Patel
(although their role at the WTO Seattle protests was severely compromised by their
collaboration with the controversial South African delegation).
Many other South African militants not only thought globally but worked
locally, concentrating on building opposition to the IMF/World Bank at local
level (with marches and events on 26 September 2000 in Johannesburg, Durban,
Cape Town, Pietersburg and East London), including Campaign Against
Neoliberalism in South Africa, the SA Non-Governmental Organisations
Coalition, the SA Communist Party, the ‘Keep Left’ collective, the Anti-
Privatisation Forum, the Treatment Action Campaign, the Northern Province’s
Movement for Delivery, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, Jubilee chapters
in KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Province and
Gauteng, a few other progressive thinktanks (such as the International Labour
Research and Information Group, the National Institute for Economic Policy, the
National Labour and Economic Development Institute, and the Institute for
Global Dialogue), environmental groups (Environmental Monitoring Group,
Earthlife Africa, Group for Environmental Monitoring and GroundWork) and
the more advanced trade unions in Cosatu (especially the SA Municipal Workers
Union, the SA Democratic Teachers Union and the National Education, Health
and Allied Workers Union).
The main activist perspectives are analysed in Part four.
3 For background, see Block, F. (1977), The Origins of International Economic
Disorder, Berkeley, University of California Press; Parboni, R. (1981), The Dollar and
its Rivals, London, Verso; Wachtel, H. (1986), The Money Mandarins, New York,
Pantheon; Wood, R. (1988), From Marshall Plan to Debt Crisis, Berkeley, University
of California Press; and Caufield, C. (1997), Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and
the Poverty of Nations, London, Macmillan.
4 For example, during the Great Depression, when the previous excesses of financiers
were addressed in US legislation, strict regulatory constraints affected the domestic
operations of American banks – including bans on interstate banking, harsh restric-
tions on the scope of banking activities, and severe limits on the amount of interest
that banks could pay depositors. This led to increasing pressure to explore foreign
markets. An ‘interest equalization tax’ was imposed in the hope of making capital
flight more costly, but actually encouraged it in the long run by providing an
unprecedented incentive to US banks to set up foreign branches immune from the
regulation. Under such domestic constraints, major US banks spent the 1960s
rapidly expanding their international branch networks in search of new markets.
Eleven US banks had 181 foreign branches in 1964; by 1974, 129 US banks oper-
ated 737 foreign branches. For details, see Mayer, M. (1984), The Money Bazaars,
New York, Simon & Schuster.
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 77
5 Andreff, W. (1984), ‘The International Centralization of Capital and the Reordering

of World Capitalism’, Capital and Class, 22, p. 62.
6 Grou, P. (1985), The Financial Structure of Multinational Capitalism, Leamington
Spa, Berg, p. 198.
7 Brenner, R. (2001), Turbulence in the World Economy, London, Verso.
8 Hawley, J. (1984), ‘Protecting Capital from Itself: U.S. Attempts to Regulate the
Eurocurrency System’, International Organization, 38(4). Eurodollars are unregu-
lated dollar deposits that are held in banks outside the US; they were first created by
the Chinese and Soviets in the 1950s to guard against US government confiscation,
but only became important as a source of funds in international financial markets in
the mid-1960s.
9 Van der Pijl, K. (1984), The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, London, Verso,
pp. 254–71.
10 Evans, T. (1985), ‘Money Makes the World Go Round’, Capital and Class, 24.
11 MacEwan, A. (1986), ‘International Debt and Banking: Rising Instability within the
General Crisis’, Science and Society, 50(2); Watkins, A. (1987), Till Debt do us Part,
Washington, DC, Carnegie Foundation.
12 Whereas 20–25 countries were in default each year during the 1930s, that number
never exceeded eight during the 1950s and 1960s. Suter, C. (1992), Debt Cycles in
the World Economy, Boulder, Westview Press, p. 63.
13 Phillips, R. (1983), ‘The Role of the International Monetary Fund in the Post-
Bretton Woods Era’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 15(2).
14 Morgan Guarantee World Bank (1986), World Financial Markets, New York,
Morgan Guarantee; Henry, J. S. (1986), ‘Where the Money Went’, New Republic,
14 April.
15 Clarke, S. (1988), Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State, Aldergate,
Edward Elgar.
16 MacEwan, A. (1990), Debt and Disorder: International Economic Instability and US
Imperial Decline, New York, Monthly Review Press.
17 Gulhati, R. (1987), ‘Recent Reforms in Africa: A Preliminary Political Economy
Perspective’, Washington, DC, World Bank.
18 More details are found in Bond, P. (2001), ‘Do Dams Mainly Serve the Rich?:
Lessons from Southern Africa’, in C. Miller (ed.), History in Dispute: Water,
Farmington Hills, Gale Publishing.
19 The Kariba loan entailed a major innovation in international-infrastructure project-
finance packaging: World Bank – £28.6 million; Central African Federation (loan
raised from copper companies) – £28 million; Commonwealth Development
Corporation – £15 million; and Commonwealth Development Finance Co. Ltd. –
£3 million. Details can be found in Bond, P. (1999), ‘Paying for Southern African
Dams: The Social Financing Gap’, paper presented by the Group for Environmental
Monitoring, International Rivers Network and Environmental Monitoring
Group, to the World Commission on Dams Africa Regional Conference, Cairo,
23 November.
20 Leys, C. (1959), European Politics in Southern Rhodesia, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, p. 111.
21 Reynolds, N., Masundire, H., Mwinga, D., Offord, R. and Siamwiza, B. (1999),
‘Kariba Dam Case Study: Scoping Paper: Final Report’, submission to the World
Commission on Dams, Cape Town, August.
22 Advisory Committee (J. Phillips, J. Hammond, L. H. Samuels, and R. J. M.
Swynnerton) (1962), Report of the Advisory Committee: The Development of
the Economic Resources of Southern Rhodesia with Particular Reference to the
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 78
Role of African Agriculture, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia Ministry of Native Affairs,

p. 87.
23 Handford, J. (1976), Portrait of an Economy Under Sanctions, 1965–1975, Salisbury,
Mercury Press, p. 148. When the illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence was
announced by Ian Smith in 1965, he also defaulted on World Bank loan repayments
amounting to several million pounds.
24 Cited in Arrighi, G. (1973), ‘The Political Economy of Rhodesia’, in G. Arrighi and
J. Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa, New York, Monthly Review Press,
p. 362.
25 Payer, C. (1982), The World Bank, New York, Monthly Review Press, pp. 239–40.
26 Property and Finance, May 1956.
27 See Bond, P. (2001), ‘A Political Economy of Dam Building and Water Supply in
Lesotho and South Africa’, in D. McDonald (ed.), Environmental Justice in South
Africa, London, James Currey and Columbus, University of Ohio Press.
28 World Bank (1999), South Africa: Country Assistance Strategy, Washington, DC,
2 March.
29 Pretoria’s unbalanced military relationship with Lesotho revived in September 1998,
when, in order to rescue a friendly government threatened by popular unrest and a
coup, SA National Defense Force troops flew by helicopter to the first LHWP dam,
Katse, and killed 17 Lesotho army troops in order to secure the area, while the capi-
tal city Maseru was burned and looted.
30 See Horta, K. (1995), ‘The Mountain Kingdom’s White Oil: The Lesotho Highlands
Water Project’, The Ecologist, 25(6) and (1996) ‘Making the Earth Rumble: The
Lesotho-South Africa Water Connection’, Multinational Monitor, May; Potts, M.
(1996), ‘Presentation by the DBSA to the Lesotho Highlands Water Workshop’, in
Group for Environmental Monitoring (ed.), Record of Proceedings: Lesotho
Highlands Water Workshop, Johannesburg, 29–30 August 1996; Bond, P. (1997),
‘Lesotho Dammed’, Multinational Monitor, January–February.
31 Business Day, 5 August 1999; Washington Post, 13 September 1999.
32 Addison, G. (1998), ‘Dam It, Let’s Pour Concrete’, The Saturday Star, 3 November.
33 Archer, R. (1996), Trust in Construction? The Lesotho Highlands Water Project,
London, Christian Aid and Maseru, Christian Council of Lesotho, pp. 58–9.
34 World Bank Inspection Panel (1998), Lesotho/South Africa: Phase 1B of Lesotho
Highlands Water Project: Panel Report and Recommendation, Washington, DC,
19 August, p. 81.
35 Roome, J. (1995), ‘Water Pricing and Management: World Bank Presentation to the
SA Water Conservation Conference’, unpublished power-point presentation, South
Africa, 2 October, p. 51. The World Bank (1999), South Africa: Country Assistance
Strategy, Annex C, p. 5 declared that Roome’s ‘power-point presentation to
Department of Water Affairs’ was ‘instrumental in facilitating a radical revision in
South Africa’s approach to bulk water management’. The World Bank was also
instrumental in retail water-related infrastructure investment, through its lead
authorship of the 1994–5 Urban Infrastructure Investment Framework com-
missioned by then-RDP minister Jay Naidoo.
36 Details are to be found in Letsie, D. and Bond, P. (2000), ‘Debating Supply and
Demand Features of Bulk Infrastructure: Lesotho-Johannesburg Water Transfer’, in
M. Khosa (ed.), Empowerment through Service Delivery, Pretoria, Human Sciences
Research Council.
37 Details are provided in Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition: From Apartheid to
Neoliberalism in South Africa, London, Pluto Press, Chapter 5.
38 World Bank, op. cit., p. 18.
Chapter 3 7/22/03 6:32 pm Page 79
39 Tellingly, rural mission leader Robert Christiansen and the director of a local World
Bank-aligned research NGO (the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre) flagged ‘a
suspicion on the part of many South Africans that the focus of the World Bank’s
program in any country was the need to lend and to dictate policy as a precondition
to that lending’. Christiansen, R. and Cooper, D. (1994), ‘Presentation to 14th
Symposium on Agriculture in Liberalizing Economies’, Washington, DC.
40 See World Bank (1998) World Development Report: Knowledge and Development,
Washington, DC.
41 World Bank (1997), ‘South Africa: Industrial Competitiveness and Job Creation
Project’, Washington, DC, Africa Regional Office.
42 World Bank, South Africa: Country Assistance Strategy, p.18.
43 Virtually all Gear’s targets were missed by vast margins. National Institute for
Economic Policy, NGQO: An Economic Bulletin, 1(1), http://www.niep.org.za,
pp. 1–3.
44 World Bank, South Africa: Country Assistance Strategy, pp. 19, 35 and 43.
45 Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (1996), Beyond ESAP, Harare, pp. 61 and i.
46 Herald, 22 February 1983.
47 World Bank (1992), Zimbabwe: Power Project, Washington, DC, Energy Division,
Eastern African Regional Office, Report #3884-ZIM, p. 3.
48 Bond, P. (1998), Uneven Zimbabwe, Trenton, Africa World Press, Chapter 10.
49 Bond, P. (1999), ‘Zimbabwe’s Political Reawakening’, Monthly Review, 50(11).
50 Financial Gazette, 12 March 1999.
51 Agence France-Presse, 20 July 1999.
52 Hanlon, J. (1988), Beggar Thy Neighbour, London, James Currey, p. 35.
53 I have laid out more detailed arguments along these lines in Bond, P. (2000),
‘Movement for Democratic Change at the Eddie Crossroads’, Southern Africa
Report, second quarter; (2001), ‘Radical Rhetoric and the Working Class during
Zimbabwean Nationalism’s Dying Days’, Journal of World Systems Research, May;
and (2001), ‘Inward versus Outward Orientation in Post-Nationalist Zimbabwe’,
Labour, Capital and Society.
54 As I argue in Uneven Zimbabwe, the economic crisis dates back further, to the mid-
1970s, when overaccumulation became a severe problem.
55 More background on the destructive role of the IMF in Mozambique can be found
in Hanlon, J. (1997), Peace without Profit, London, James Currey.
56 Details provided in Bond, P. (1998), ‘Mozambican Parliament Questions Debt
Management’, Sunday Independent, 21 December; and see rebuttal letters from the
World Bank’s Mozambique officer Phyllis Pomerantz on 24 January 1999, and from
myself and Joe Hanlon on 7 February 1999 and 11 July 1999. See also Denny, C. and
Elliott, L. (1999), ‘Fund Admits Debt Plans will Fail Poor’, Guardian, 19 April.
57 International Monetary Fund (1999), Mozambique: Enhanced Structural Adjustment
Facility Framework Paper for April 1999–March 2002, Washington, DC.
58 World Bank (2000), Sourcebook on Community Driven Development in the Africa
Region: Community Action Programs, Washington, DC, Africa Regional Office,
17 March (signatories: Calisto Madavo and Jean-Louis Sarbib), Annex 2.
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 80
CHAPTER FOUR
Foreign aid, development and

underdevelopment
1. Introduction
The ongoing global economic crisis is unevenly experienced, as Chapter
one has shown. Washington’s capacity to stall and shift the crisis generated
a degree of relative prosperity during the 1990s within the advanced
capitalist countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD). Yet donor aid by OECD member states accounted
for less than a quarter of 1% of their GDP in 1998, the lowest figure since
statistics began in 1950 (and far lower than the 0.7% agreed to at the Rio
Earth Summit in 1992). As persistent development-aid failures and corrup-
tion led to alleged public-opinion ‘aid fatigue’, the real value of North-
South aid fell during the 1990s by a third.1 Already by January 1995,
President Nelson Mandela had famously criticised President Clinton for his
three-year, $600 million aid package through the US Agency for
International Development (USAID): ‘It’s peanuts. We would have ex-
pected from the United States far more than that.’2
Yet even in declining amounts, aid remains a vital determinant of the
political and economic conditions of many recipient countries. For increas-
ingly dependent recipients in Sub-Saharan Africa (aside from South
Africa), aid/GDP ratios soared from 6% from 1975–84 to 13% by the early
1990s. Relations between aid and development also reveal a great deal
about international and local power structures and struggles.
South Africa was pledged approximately $5 billion in foreign
development-related aid from 1994 to 1999, an enormous sum compared to
other, more desperate, African countries. The grants and loans that were
‘pledged’ – though not fully committed, disbursed or implemented – to
Pretoria in this period included vast funds from the European Union
($1.75 billion), United States ($800 million) and Japan ($550 million). The
degree to which funding actually reached beneficiaries was highly variable,
with ‘delivery’ areas like rural water or roads recording very low levels. One
report judged that the aid record of the largest donor, the EU, was ‘abysmal’,
in part because its ratio of money actually committed to that pledged was just
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 81
F OREIGN AID , DEVELOPMENT AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT 81
51%, and the amount disbursed compared to that committed was only 13%.3
Even by mid-1999, fully two-thirds of the previous five-years’ worth of EU
pledges had not been spent.4 Yet while government could not disburse its
own development-related monies in housing, infrastructure, land reform and
many other fields, due to lack of capacity, foreign donors simultaneously
shifted from funding civil society to funding the state, as I will describe below.
Although it is small in comparison to the wide variety of state spending
programmes, at just 2% of the national budget, aid contributes a substan-
tial share to South African development funding, particularly of capital
projects. Given that the state spends a large amount of its budget (90%) on
recurrent costs, foreign aid can be decisive in shifting capital expenditure
into areas donors decide – although sometimes without much reference to
sustainability, maintenance and infrastructure. It was presumed that many
aid missions would end their work after 1999, once democratic develop-
ment policies were established and implementation got under way, but
most have continued to justify a presence on the basis of unfulfilled
programme and project implementation.
Studies of post-1994 aid to South Africa are only now beginning in
earnest.5 Donors, state officials and civil society recipients are reliant for
assessments upon popular perceptions sometimes captured in the media,
and upon hidden consultancy reports. The largely negative character of the
former and apolitical nature of the latter are themselves of interest. Until a
more comprehensive investigation into donor activity is published,6 this
chapter merely captures some of the main debating points that have arisen
in both popular and behind-the-scenes analysis. Three key issues that
emerge from even an initial review of the aid industry include aid as a tool
of foreign policy leverage, the appropriateness of hard-currency loans for
development and the uneven impact of donor aid on civil society. I will
consider each below.
2. Dependency and leverage

The incentives for donors to give aid are diverse. Amsterdam-based aid
critic David Sogge argues that the economic agenda behind much aid
includes access to markets, commercial rivalry and acquisition of local
primary products. Beneficiaries include
agribusinesses; purveyors of arms, aircraft, vehicles, pharmaceuticals and
engineering services; and universities, which accepted African bursary hold-
ers … Consultants and other bearers of technical assistance for SSA have
accounted for about one-third of all aid flows … [As a result,] public sector
management is weakened, due to national policies being segmented into
discreet projects designed by and for the aid system; internal brain-drain to
agencies from the public service; and aid agencies developing ‘kingdoms’ in
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 82
specified provinces, cities or ‘development corridors’, thus distorting inter-

nal relationships and blocking coherent national policy development … The
aid system has shifted accountability toward foreign funders and away from
voters and taxpayers, undermining citizen-state reciprocity.7
Concerns over dependency and increasing donor leverage remain wide-
spread. Less than a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, the
then-president of the National Union of Mineworkers, James Motlatsi,
pronounced, ‘South Africa must be independent of foreign aid … Then we
will be able to get on with our independence without having to look con-
tinually over our shoulders in case we are being destabilised.’8
Policy destabilisation
The degree to which aid influences policy in South Africa is hotly debated.
The influential advisory role of the World Bank, often through ‘donor co-
ordination’ projects, has tended to reinforce the perception that aid is
tightly bound up with the broader neo-liberal agenda of shrinking the state.
Although virtually no loans were requested by South Africa, there have
been many other means of World Bank policy persuasion, including ‘just-
in-time policy availability’, training sessions and strategic visits by South
Africans to World Bank headquarters. World Bank teams have successfully
introduced neo-liberal policy advice in areas such as macroeconomic policy,
the basic housing and infrastructure programme, land reform, national
water pricing, welfare-programme cuts and the like. In even a policy matter
as obscure (yet as vital) as bulk-water pricing, the World Bank describes its
advisory role as ‘instrumental’.9
Yet while there is usually some motivation by donors to induce policy
changes, this is not always successful. Foreign aid ‘has had no net effect on
the recipients’ growth rate or the quality of their economic policies’,
according to World Bank aid researchers David Dollar and Craig Burnside,
in a study of post-1970 donations that attempts to shift blame for ineffec-
tual neo-liberalism to aid recipients: ‘We got into thinking we could induce
countries to reform. But it turns out this was wrong.’10 The occasional unre-
liability of foreign aid as policy leverage is reflected in the case of Taiwanese
donations to South Africa. In 1994, these were apparently aimed initially at
currying political favour with the ANC – a donation of $10 million to the
party prior to the first election was cited as one basis for retaining official
SA recognition of Taiwan instead of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)11
– and later at influencing government policy for the same reason by the
supply or withholding of development aid. Thus, when in 1996 South
Africa reversed its position by recognising the PRC, the furious Taiwanese
foreign minister, John Chang, suspended grants to South Africa worth $80
million and loans worth $50 million.
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 83
Debate has also raged over the European Union’s interests in South
Africa, particularly in relation to the EU-SA free-trade agreement in March
1999, to which continued grant aid is integrally tied. The 12-year deal
allows South Africa slightly more time than EU firms for adaptation to
declining import protection. But extremely severe competition from
European imports is anticipated in sectors as diverse as clothing and auto-
mobiles. The free-trade agreement was controversial in part because at the
last moment, in April 1999, Germany and Holland requested a brand new
and seemingly unrelated repatriation clause for illegal aliens from South
Africa, and because southern European countries demanded greater agri-
cultural protection, particularly against SA use of traditional brand names
of alcohol.12
US strings attached
Tied service contracts represent a highly visible way in which foreign aid
supports donor constituencies. These are not unlike the tied commodity-
import programmes that are popular amongst aid agencies so as to assure
donor-country sales of farm and related equipment to aid recipients. Even
conservative commentator Simon Barber of Business Day newspaper
alleged that Clinton’s $600 million aid package to South Africa for 1994–6
was a ‘sleight of hand’, because $72 million were for US export promotion
and at least $75 million were not in grants, but rather loan guarantees on
housing loans.13 US donor programmes came under further suspicion as
Republican Party pressure emerged in 1995 to cut the US government aid
budget, for defenders argued that they benefitted Americans as much as
South Africans.
As Andrew Young, former US representative to the United Nations,
noted when organising his ‘Constituency for Africa’ against the 1995
Republican Party threat to cut aid, ‘We get a five to one return on invest-
ment in Africa, through our trade, investment, finance and aid. Don’t you
see, we’re not aiding Africa by sending them aid, Africa’s aiding us.’ At the
same Constituency for Africa meeting, Washington-based aid consultant
Joseph Szlavik warned African aid recipients: ‘Pay more attention to their
voting in the United Nations, trying to meet the US position more often
than they currently do. By moving forward, African countries will be able
to “win friends and influence people” as the saying goes.’14
Most evidently, this was the case when in early 1997 President Clinton
threatened to withdraw aid shortly after the South African cabinet
approved arms sales to Syria in December 1996, which the US considers a
terrorist state. According to one press report, ‘In the toughest public warn-
ing it has ever issued to President Nelson Mandela’s government, the
Clinton administration said yesterday it was “deeply concerned” by cabi-
net’s provisional approval of a R3bn arms sale (aim-enhancing gear for
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 84
Soviet-made tanks) to Syria, and might be obliged under US law to suspend

aid to SA.’15 Although Mandela replied in March 1997 that it was immoral
to abandon countries that had supported the ANC in the anti-apartheid
fight ‘on the advice of countries that were friends of the apartheid regime’
(i.e. the US), defence minister Joe Modise confirmed that a marketing
permit was issued for the arms, but that, in the wake of the US warning,
‘We did not tender, as no documentation was received from Syria.’16
Later, South Africa’s Medicines and Related Substances Control
Amendment Act of 1997 (especially Section 15c) raised a major controversy
because it threatened the interests of US, and to some extent European,
pharmaceutical companies by promoting cheaper imports of generic
drugs.17 In response, the companies used congressional allies to (unsuc-
cessfully) pressure the US government in 1998 to ‘prohibit aid to the SA
government until Congress receives a report containing the plan of action
to negotiate the repeal, suspension or termination of section 15c’.18 As
Chapter 9 will show, only pressure from grassroots activists was sufficient
to reverse the US strategy.
What sometimes appears as overt US involvement in South African
politics is also widely condemned. At the 50th conference of the ANC in
December 1997, Mandela harshly criticised USAID policies for having a
political agenda, especially in support of NGO opposition groups.19 As
Business Day stated, ‘When government first voiced its concern about
NGOs receiving foreign donor support, fears were heightened that Pretoria
wanted to undermine the independence of NGOs – a crucial feature of
these organisations.’ Still, editorialised Business Day, ‘SA needs to be care-
ful of unnecessarily alienating foreign donors. Aid agencies should not be
confused with charities. Whether one likes it or not, they are instruments of
foreign policy, designed to further their governments’ political and
commercial interests.’20
In 1998, a confidential internal US government report more explicitly
accused USAID officials of ‘extreme and unqualified meddling’ in SA policy-
making.21 Rev. Frank Chikane, a key Mbeki advisor, commented at the time
that donors must ‘loosen aid strings, including the use of foreign nationals’,
who should be ‘a last resort in development projects. If the necessary expert-
ise is not available in SA, it will be sourced from anywhere in the world, not
necessarily from the donor nation as is now currently the practice.’22
3. Currency risk on loans

A major trend in the aid industry is the evolution of donor grants into loans.
The most active aid-related lenders were the EU and Japan (whose
grant/loan ratios were $740/$675 million and $40/$500 million,
respectively). Should South Africa take foreign aid in the form of hard
currency loans? According to the Reconstruction and Development
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 85
Programme, ‘The RDP must use foreign debt financing only for those
elements of the programme that can potentially increase our capacity for
foreign earnings.’23 As the SA National Civic Organisation explained in
1994 in its report, Making People-Driven Development Work,
The reason for the hard line on foreign borrowing is three-fold. First, South
Africa is awash with capital, and at least in the short term does not need to
borrow abroad. Second, and more important, is the much reported foreign
debt trap. Foreign loans are denominated in foreign currency – dollars, yen,
ecu, etc. During the coming years, the Rand will continue to devalue against
those currencies, so that even if the interest rate is very low in dollar terms
the effective cost in Rand may be much higher. This, in turn, is cyclic – if
foreign borrowing is high then international financial institutions such as the
IMF push for further devaluation, which further increases the Rand repay-
ments. Thus, the more foreign debt South Africa takes, the more onerous
become the repayment conditions. Many countries – including industrialis-
ing ones like South Africa – have been caught in this trap and found that
supposedly soft loans became a millstone around their neck. Third, no
foreign loan is truly unconditional – there are always restrictions on the use
of the loan or on government economic policy, and these impose a substan-
tial hidden cost (pp. 60–1).
Mixed signals
The RDP foreign-loan provision was widely accepted, even in the business
press.24 Thus in 1998, South Africa turned down $75 million worth of
Japanese loans for KwaZulu-Natal bulk-water development and the
upgrading of Eastern Cape rural roads because, as one report noted, ‘the
requirement to provide only yen-denominated loans was making Japanese
loans only marginally cheaper. This signals an increasingly cautious
approach to foreign aid by government.’ The Department of Finance itself
explained, ‘Due to exchange rate risks, and increased costs associated with
taking out forward cover, the landed cost of the loans is only marginally
cheaper than loan facilities on the local market.’25
However, foreign development lending still continues, particularly to
South Africa’s major foreign parastatal borrowers, such as the Development
Bank of Southern Africa. With the currency suffering periodic declines,
including two bouts of 30% nominal devaluation over a few weeks in early
1996 and mid-1998, as well as a 25% drop during 2000, repaying such loans
in cases where there are no offsetting hard-currency income sources is
bound to be prohibitively expensive. For many years, South Africa avoided
a World Bank loan estimated in the range of $750 million for basic infra-
structure. As Kgalema Motlanthe put it, ‘Once you start taking loans from
the World Bank and IMF, they can tell you even who your finance minister
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 86
must be.’26 Yet rumours continually resurfaced of that loan’s resurrection in

the Departments of Provincial and Local Government, and Finance.
4. Civil society expectations

The most debilitating experience for many civil society organisations since
1994 was being unceremoniously dumped by donors, at a time when donor
funding for government was going unspent. According to the South African
NGO Coalition (Sangoco, an advocacy group with 3 000 member
organisations that include both NGOs and community-based organisations
or CBOs):
Despite the commitment signalled by Government in the Reconstruction and
Development Programme (RDP), NGOs and CBOs in South Africa have
come to experience a massive crisis of unparalleled proportion in the present
transition. The root of the crisis lies in the major funding squeeze that the
sector is experiencing. Major international donors, corporate and other
donors, anticipating the new government would step in to fund this sector
have reprioritised their allocation of development finance, withdrawn or
claim that they are putting their money in government for the RDP. This has
resulted in the sector experiencing a major funding drain and many
organisations collapsing.27
Yet at the same time, a proliferation of Northern-based NGOs and donor
agencies appeared in South Africa, with some taking on functions of
support to community development once performed by organic South
African NGOs. As a result, South African civil-society organisations have
lobbied strenuously for an indigenous donor agency. The main vehicle
chosen by the government to channel foreign aid to NGOs (including
CBOs, other development organisations and the labour movement) is the
National Development Agency (NDA), formerly known as the Transitional
National Development Trust (TNDT). The TNDT emerged, in a bureau-
cratic and tardy manner, during the intensifying funding crisis immediately
following the first democratic elections in 1994. It is generally accepted that
the establishment of the TNDT and NDA represented belated and in-
adequate responses to the decline in funding.
Strangling civil society

Perhaps the two most widely held concerns on the establishment of a conduit
of funding from government to civil society are the long delays in these struc-
tures becoming operational, resulting in lengthy ‘funding gaps’, and the
small amounts of money assigned to these institutions. The two funding gaps
occurred between 1994 and 1997 and from 1998 until 2000, when, after
many delays, the NDA became operational. Even as late as mid-2000,
however, many TNDT recipients were denied NDA funds, and collapsed.28
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 87
The South African government promised to fund the NDA to the tune
of R50 million in its first year of operation, R165 million in the second year
and R265 million in the third, which represents an increased commitment.
This is nevertheless still well short of the amount required to provide
adequate support to the sector. The Independent Development Trust’s
promised contribution of R100 million was well short of the support it
could provide, given its reserves in excess of R1 billion. There were inter-
minable delays experienced in the Department of Trade and Industry in
disbursal of lottery monies to NGOs and charities. The EU, as the only
major contributor to the TNDT aside from government, played an impor-
tant role, yet the contribution of R70 million during the late 1990s
represents an average of a mere R15 million a year. A further EU promise
of 30 million euros over three years represents a declining ratio of EU
funding compared to government funding.29
Moreover, debate has raged over which sectors should be funded and
which shouldn’t. In 1997, for example, the Nedlac Community
Constituency attacked the NDA Advisory Committee’s Final Report: ‘It
fails to recognise the potential problems and pitfalls of a body which
engages in both funding and determining development policy, that is, deter-
mining what is to be funded. It is inadvertently assigning a gatekeeper role
to the organisation.’ Sangoco, in a report on the proposed funder, added:
‘The principal role of the NDA should be that of being a conduit for devel-
opment grant finance to NGOs and CBOs, who should be the implement-
ing agents of development projects and the recipient beneficiaries of grant
funds.’30
5. Attributing blame
Are the complaints about foreign development aid recorded above
convincing? They must be tempered by the South African government’s
own enormous shortcomings in managing aid. The ANC had, after all,
promised to ‘introduce measures to ensure that foreign governmental and
non-governmental aid supports the RDP’,31 but, in fact, failed to do so, in
part because its own policies often directly violated the RDP.32
To some extent, contradictory policies, weak programmes and
unsustainable projects were major factors in the failure of foreign-funded
development. Financial sustainability was a perennial problem, for typically
once capital spending has generated some form of physical infrastructure,
donors have achieved what they want and move on to the next project,
without sufficient concern about the recipients’ ability to afford the recur-
rent operating and maintenance costs of the project. This was remarked
upon by finance minister Chris Liebenberg: ‘Donors often insist that aid is
used to build something like a hospital or township but forget that the
government is left to put in the infrastructure and maintenance which puts
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 88
a tremendous strain on the budget which is struggling to meet basic

needs.’33
Moreover, the South African government’s own oversight of donor
activity has left much to be desired. The representative responsible for
managing aid – in the case of the EU’s $1.75 billion, for example – was the
deputy-minister of finance (from 1994 to 1996, Alec Erwin, and from 1996
to 1999, Gill Marcus). As the EU’s South Africa Country Review put it,
however, ‘there is no real involvement [by the deputy-minister of finance]
… in terms of policy dialogue on national priorities and the main focus of
EU support. As far as coordination is concerned, no framework has been
set up for dialogue between government and the donor community as a
whole; the dialogue is organised at bilateral level between SA and the donor
concerned.’34
Moreover, in fields like education and health, according to the same EU
report, there was ‘no real institutional framework for donor coordination;
it is the case with the Ministry of Education, to a lesser extent with the
Ministry of Health, and this has a negative influence on the implementation
of the programme’. Although this was partly due to the provincial respon-
sibility for implementation in these areas, the Department of Trade and
Industry was also criticised by the EU for ‘weak capacities at technical and
administrative level’.35
It may be possible to conclude, therefore, that there are extremely good
– and some bad – reasons for foreign aid to have generated negative percep-
tions in the post-apartheid era. Many of these reasons can, ultimately, be
located at the levels of specific policies, programmes and projects within the
South African state. However, enough additional concerns about the
agendas and modus operandi of donors are raised by these experiences to
suggest the need for a fundamental rethink.
This was also the conclusion arrived at from a balanced analysis of aid
across Africa, conducted during 2000 by the Harare-based African
Network on Debt and Development. Citing a World Bank study that
acknowledges that ‘a typical poor country receives 90% of GDP through
Aid but the poorest quartile of the population consume only 4% of the
GDP’, Opa Kapijimpanga concluded that ‘aid is a tool to serve the
commercial, political, economic and strategic interests of donor countries’.
As a result, ‘The donor creditor countries must keep all their aid and
against it write off all the debt owed by poor African countries … The
bottom line would be elimination of both aid and debt because they re-
inforce the power relations that are contributing to the imbalances in the
world.’36
Ultimately, the use of aid – and possibly debt cancellation and repara-
tions payments, if channelled through the state – depends on whether
increased pressure can be put on Pretoria and other regional state capitals
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 89
to serve the needs of the citizenry. As we will see in Part two, there are many
reasons to question whether meeting the needs of the citizenry is indeed the
agenda of the South African government, in the context of worsening
global apartheid.
Notes
1 Financial Times, 11 November 1998.
2 Business Day, 14 January 1995.
3 Commitments failed to translate into disbursements and implementation for several
reasons: an overly bureaucratic RDP Office (which initially funded aid-related
projects on a reimbursement basis, not up-front, and had excessively complex
requirements for project business plans); a requirement to direct funding through
the general revenue fund; parliamentary oversight; project tendering requirements;
the imposition of VAT on aid; complex donor procedures; conflicts with govern-
ment; and an increasingly demobilised civil society. See Bratton, M. and Landsberg,
C. (1998), ‘Trends in Aid to South Africa’, Indicator SA, 15(4).
4 Montes, C., Migliorisi, S. and Wolfe, T. (1999), ‘Evaluation of EC Country Strategy:
South Africa, 1996–99’, Paris, Investment Development Consultancy and Rome,
Development Strategy, p. v.
5 See, for example, Bratton, M. and Landsberg, C. (1998), ‘From Promise to Delivery:
Official Development Assistance to South Africa, 1994–98’, Johannesburg, Centre
for Policy Studies; Budlender, D. (1999), ‘Donor Funding Poses Questions for
South Africa’, Budget Watch, IDASA Budget Information Service, August;
Budlender, D. and Dube, N. (1999), ‘Gender and Official Development Assistance
in South Africa’, in D. Budlender (ed.), The Fourth Women’s Budget, Cape Town,
IDASA; Heard, J. (1999), ‘Foreign Aid, Democratisation and Civil Society in
Southern Africa: A Study of South Africa, Ghana and Uganda’, IDS Discussion Paper
368; and Love, R. (1999), ‘Changing Aid Patterns in Southern Africa’, Development
in Practice, 9(3).
6 Such research is under way in the Department of Finance and the University of
Natal-Durban’s Centre for Social and Development Studies. A good model is the
study of Lesotho aid by James Ferguson (1994), The Anti-Politics Machine,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
7 Sogge, D. (1998), ‘Misgivings: Aid to Africa’, Indicator SA, 15(4). See also Sogge, D.
(ed.) (1996), Compassion and Calculation: The Politics of Private Foreign Aid,
London, Pluto Press.
8 SAPA, 19 January 1995.
9 For an accounting of such influence from within, see the World Bank (1999), South
Africa Country Assistance Strategy, Washington, DC; for a more critical account, see
Chapter three, above, and Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition: From Apartheid to
Neoliberalism in South Africa, London, Pluto Press and Pietermaritzburg, University
of Natal Press, Chapter 5.
10 Financial Times, 14 April 1997. See these authors’ 1997 summary, ‘Aid Spurs Growth
– In a Sound Policy Environment’, Finance and Development, 34(4) and their 1998
book, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why, Washington, DC, World
Bank.
11 Tony Leon, leader of the opposition Democratic Party, concluded, ‘Our whole
foreign policy is based on the electoral debts of the ANC. When the ANC is short
of cash it runs off to the Gulf states or to Morocco for help.’ (Mail and Guardian,
8 December 1995.)
Chapter 4 7/22/03 6:39 pm Page 90
12 Just as importantly, the deal has been criticised by regional policy-makers for lack of
transparency and for its potentially devastating impact on (non-SA) regional
manufacturing firms (in view of far more competitive European firms using SA as a
trading base to penetrate into the region). Zimbabwe and Zambia even imposed new
protectionist barriers against SA imports, in the wake of 40% of Zimbabwe’s manu-
facturing output disappearing between 1991 and 1995, and 75% of Zambia’s
formal-sector jobs evaporating during the same period.
13 Business Day, 24 May 1994.
14 Bond, P. (1995), ‘A Five to One Return’, African Agenda, 1(2), March.
15 Business Day, 16 January 1997.
16 The Star, 19 March 1997.
17 Bond, P. (1999), ‘Globalization, Pharmaceutical Pricing and South African Health
Policy: Managing Confrontation with US Firms and Politicians’, International
Journal of Health Policy, 29(4).
18 Business Day, 20 July 1998.
19 Business Day, 16 December 1997.
20 Business Day, 16 March 1998.
21 Business Day, 19 February 1998.
23 African National Congress (1994), Reconstruction and Development Programme,
Johannesburg, Umanyano Publications, sec. 6.5.16.
24 See the discussion in Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition, pp. 174–5.
25 Business Day, 2 March 1998.
26 Business Day, 6 June 2000.
27 Submission of the South African NGO Coalition to the Advisory Committee
Investigating the Feasibility of the Establishment of a National Development
Agency, undated.
28 Sunday Independent Reconstruct, 21 May 2000.
29 Concerns were articulated, off the record, that the EU insisted on micromanaging
TNDT development priorities, as a result of a regular insistence on its right to give
the go-ahead on individual projects to be funded from the EU contribution to the
TNDT.
30 The Star, 11 July 2000.
31 African National Congress, op. cit., sec. 6.5.16.
32 Bond, P. and Khosa, M. (1999), An RDP Policy Audit, Pretoria, Human Sciences
Research Council.
33 Mail and Guardian, 21 July 1995.
34 European Union South Africa Mission (1999), South Africa Country Review,
Pretoria.
35 Ibid.
36 Kapijimpanga, O. (2001), ‘An Aid/Debt Trade-Off the Best Option’, in G. Ostravik
(ed.), The Reality of Aid Reality Check 2001, Oslo, Norwegian Peoples Aid.
Part 2 7/22/03 6:44 pm Page 91
PA R T TWO
Elite contestation of global governance
Thabo Mbeki addresses the World Economic Forum ‘Backlash against

Globalisation’ plenary, Davos, January 2001.
Part 2 7/22/03 6:44 pm Page 92
Top: Chair of the IMF/World Bank Board of Governors, Trevor Manuel,

Washington, April 2000 (with James Wolfensohn, far right).
Bottom: Trevor Ngwane (from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre)
debates George Soros, Davos, January 2001.
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 93
CHAPTER FIVE
The global balance of forces
1. Introduction
South Africa has been contesting the terrain of international economics
with increasing vigour since the late 1990s. In Part one, I examined that
terrain using a simplistic dichotomy as our conceptual map, i.e. struggles
between those promoting what we can call ‘global apartheid’, and those
fighting for social justice. But by the turn of the 21st century, a more accu-
rate reading of the balance of forces required examination of at least five
major currents of argumentation and activism. From those currents follow
different analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances.
What forces have been working on the fragile architecture of the inter-
national financial system, and what is the likelihood of their success in
achieving their aims? By examining both ideological and material positions
related to crisis management, we can identify three of these five tendencies,
all located in Washington, which aim to bolster the architecture in the
interests of the North (see Section 2). In contrast, two other tendencies are
much more critical of the status quo, even though they differ about ‘fixing’
or ‘nixing’ the international financial, investment and trade system (see
Section 3). The five positions, from left to right on the political spectrum,
can be labelled as follows:
1) ‘Global justice movements’;
2) ‘Third World nationalism’;
3) the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’;
4) the ‘Washington Consensus’; and
5) the ‘Resurgent right wing’ (see Table 3).1
The balance of these forces shifts constantly, with no durable alliances in

sight (see Section 4). Even the fluidity with which key individuals move
between two or more camps is disconcerting. Thabo Mbeki, President
George W. Bush, US labour leaders, financier George Soros and many
others often appear in more than one of the camps within very short periods
of time, depending upon circumstances and perceived opportunities. But
the philosophical positions appear ever more clearly delineated. Getting a
Chapter 5
Table 3: Five reactions to the global crisis
94
7/22/03
Global justice Third World Post-Washington Washington Resurgent
E LITE
movements nationalism Consensus Consensus right wing
6:43 pm
CONTESTATION OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
Main Against Join the Reform Slightly adjust Restore US
argument globalisation system, but on ‘imperfect the status quo isolationism;
of capital much fairer markets’; (transparency, punish banks’
Page 94
(not people), for terms achieve supervision and mistakes
‘people-centred ‘sustainable regulation)
development’ development’
Key Social/labour Self-selecting Most UN US agencies Populist and

institutions movements; Third World agencies; (Treasury, libertarian
environment- nation states governments of Federal wings of
advocacy (Algeria, France and Japan; Reserve, Republican
groups; radical- Argentina, [SA government?] USAID); Party; American
activist Brazil, China, Bretton Woods Enterprise
networks; Cuba, Egypt, institutions; Institute; Cato
regional and Haiti, India, WTO; centrist Institute;
national Malaysia, Washington Manhattan
coalitions; Mexico, think-tanks; Institute;
Chapter 5
left-wing think- Pakistan, British and Heritage
7/22/03
tanks; Russia, German Foundation
academic Venezuela, governments;
settings; [many Zimbabwe); [SA [SA government?]
6:43 pm
SA groups] government?]
Key Amin, Bello, Aristide, Castro, Annan, Jospin, Baker?, Blair, Buchanan,
Page 95
proponents Bendana, Chavez, Lafontaine?, Brown, Bush?, Bush?, Haider,
Bordieu, Bove, Mahathir, Krugman, Camdessus, Helms, Le Pen,
Brutus, Mbeki?, Sachs, Soros, Clinton, Lindsay?, Lott,
Chalmers, Mugabe, Stiglitz Fischer, Kissinger,
Chomsky, Obasanjo, Putin Greenspan, Meltzer?,
T HE
Danaher, Koehler, Moore, Shultz
GLOBAL BALANCE OF FORCES

Galeano, O’Neill?, Rubin,
George, Schroeder,
Kagarlitsky, Summers,
Khor, Klein, Wolfensohn
Lula, Maathai,
Marcos, Nader,
Ndungane,
Njehu, Patkar,
Pilger, Shiva,
Trumka?
95
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 96
96 E LITE CONTESTATION OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
handle on those positions is crucial, to set the stage for strategic considera-
tions of the elite-reform gambit of South African government leaders, as I
will discuss in the two subsequent chapters.
2. The pro-status-quo forces

The Washington Consensus
I will consider, firstly, the most powerful force: the pro-status-quo
Washington Consensus, which has dogmatically promoted free trade, finan-
cial liberalisation and foreign investment incentives, business deregulation,
low taxes, fiscal austerity and privatisation, high real interest rates, and
flexible labour markets.2 If there were problems outstanding in the world
economy, they would always merely be temporary, according to this group-
ing, to be overcome by more IMF bailouts (embarrassingly generous to
New York bankers though they were), intensified application of ‘sound’
macroeconomic policies, augmented by greater transparency, a touch more
financial sector supervision and regulation, and less Asian cronyism. (An
IMF attempt in early 1999 to go a bit further and establish a Washington
Consensus ‘lender of last resort’ was discredited, for it was seen as a naked
power play.)
Personalities are important here, even if we are sometimes confused by
their erratic, opportunistic twists and turns, and by their habit of telling lies
about their underlying agenda. Providing political cover for the status quo
at the end of the century were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (with no objec-
tion from Gerhard Schroeder of Germany). Providing operational support
were US treasury secretary Robert Rubin and the man who replaced him in
1999, Lawrence Summers, US Federal Reserve chairperson Alan Green-
span, and IMF managing director Michel Camdessus and his 2000 replace-
ment Horst Koehler, ably supported by deputy MD Stanley Fischer.
Gordon Brown, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, chaired a key IMF
committee which coerced consent from the lowlier member states, and
Canadian finance minister Paul Martin served much the same function with
the G-20 group of finance ministers (including some nationalists). Offering
periodic intellectual justification were Fischer and Summers. World Bank
president James Wolfensohn was very much a Washington man, even if he
sometimes had to pretend he wasn’t.3 WTO secretary Michael Moore regu-
larly pretended he was a New Zealand labour leftist, but in reality proved
(together with Clinton’s US trade representative Charlene Barshefsky) that
he was prepared to defend Washington’s corporate sponsors no matter the
shame involved.
The Bush administration has given mixed signals, as we see below, but
the likely orientation was in the old establishment mould set by James Baker
and Nicholas Brady during George Bush Sr.’s presidency in 1989–93. (Paul
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 97
T HE GLOBAL BALANCE OF FORCES 97
O’Neill as treasury secretary would represent corporate interests with no

qualms, having served as chief executive of International Paper and the
Aluminum Corporation of America, two of that country’s worst polluters
and right-wing firms.)
A variety of bank and corporate-sponsored Washington think-tanks
echoed the party line, while allies were found in the World Trade
Organisation, the Bank for International Settlements, the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development, and numerous academic
economic departments that followed the University of Chicago’s lead. But
even if free-marketeers could be found in every country (and when in
government, mostly in central banks and finance ministries), the accent was
always Washington’s. Given Japan’s decline during the 1990s, most of the
main beneficiaries of the Washington Consensus were firms with their
headquarters in the US. As conservative economist Rudiger Dornbusch
conceded in 1998, ‘The IMF is a toy of the United States to pursue its
economic policy offshore.’4
Aside from Third World nationalists and leftists who were critical of US-
centric economic policy, two other positions emerged as threats to the
Washington Consensus during the late 1990s. Neither fundamentally ques-
tioned the profit system, nor the prerogative of US-based corporations to
dominate the world. The most important, thanks to their control of key
committees of the US Congress and their influence in the Bush administra-
tion were the right-wing libertarians, populists and establishment politicos
crossed with liberal internationalism; while the apparent Post-Washington
Consensus successors to the Washington Consensus appeared in 1998–99,
then quickly faded. I will consider each in turn.
The resurgent US right wing

Amongst those scornful of the Washington Consensus were conservatives,
largely based in reactionary pockets of the US. But it was a mistake to
discount congressional heavyweights like Senators Jesse Helms and Trent
Lott (with House of Representatives allies Dennis Hastert and Dick
Armey), or loud-mouthed populists like Pat Buchanan and their kind as
mere rednecks. Jean Marie le Pen of France and Jörg Haider of Austria
would represent the neo-fascist movements – with their traditional anti-
semitic hatred of bankers – giving the right wing an international flavour.
Moreover, the right-wing critique of public bailouts for New York finan-
ciers was backed by think-tanks like the stalwartly conservative Heritage
Foundation and the libertarian but very influential Cato Institute in
Washington.
Surprisingly, their disgust of Bretton Woods interventionism was closely
paralleled by elite conservative concerns, notably those of Henry Kissinger
and George Shultz, geopoliticians who lost dear friends like President
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 98
Suharto of Indonesia in the 1997–8 financial turmoil. (Others from the

Republican elite who revolted against Washington financial managers were
Nixon’s treasury secretary William Simon, former Citibank boss Walter
Wriston and former Reagan administration chief economist Martin
Feldstein.) Together, by 1998, these resurgent rightists had mounted both a
formidable attack on IMF policies as unworkable, and opposition to the US
Treasury Department’s request for $18 billion in further IMF funding.5
The Bush administration has economic tendencies towards the resurgent
right, thanks in part to the powerful advisory role of Lawrence Lindsay, a
critic of bank bailouts, the key appointment of John Taylor, who once called
for the IMF’s abolition, as under-secretary of the Treasury6 and the anti-
cipated renewal of the agenda proposed by the Republican right’s Meltzer
Commission. Carnegie Mellon University economist Alan Meltzer’s report
in 2000 recommended substantial downsizing of the IMF and World Bank;
in the same spirit in October 1998, the Republican-controlled Congress
demanded that higher interest rates and faster payback periods be imposed
on IMF borrowers, before finally approving the $18 billion in new appro-
priations the IMF insisted was required to keep its bailout fund topped up.7
The most interesting problem for Washington analysts is deciphering the
occasional tactical alliances between, say, a Buchanan and left-wing populist
movements, such as the Ralph Nader networks and Friends of the Earth, a
point that will be taken up again in Chapter 10.8 Political strategies that
unite right and left, as inter-war Germany showed, do most damage to the
latter. While the right-wing challenge appears formidable at times, it is also
subject to co-option (as Clinton achieved with the 1998 recapitalisation).
Xenophobia and isolationism are also logical political threats from this
political stance, and economically it wouldn’t be hard to envisage latter-day
Smoot Hawley-style protective tariffs kicking off a downward spiral of
trade degeneration reminiscent of the early 1930s, if resurgent right-wing
advocates had their way.
The Post-Washington Consensus

The third pro-status-quo position was termed the ‘Post-Washington
Consensus’ by former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.9 Aimed
at perfecting the capitalist system’s ‘imperfect markets’, Stiglitz cited
organic problems like asymmetric information in market transactions (espe-
cially finance) and anti-competitive behaviour by firms as key contributors
to the current instability. However, by advocating somewhat more substan-
tive national regulatory interventions (tougher anti-trust measures, and
even ‘speedbumps’ or dual exchange rates to slow hot money) and more
attention to social development and employment, Stiglitz was as reluctant
to tamper with underlying dynamics as was George Soros, whose call for a
global banking insurance fund looked suspiciously self-interested, in
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 99
particular since it came at a time, in August 1998, when he lost several

billion dollars of his Russian investments because of Boris Yeltsin’s default
on state debt.10 Similarly, Soros played a pro-Washington role at Prague
when on a panel that was challenged by left-wing critics.
Others from a neo-liberal economic background who jumped the
Washington Consensus ship include Massachusetts Institute of Technology
economist Paul Krugman, who claimed both a temporary fondness for
capital controls to halt speculative runs and responsibility for Mahathir bin
Mohamad’s restrictions on trading the Malaysian ringgit in September
1998.11 (Further analysis of Krugman’s views on capital controls can be
found in Chapter twelve.) Similarly, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Harvard
Institute for International Development, offered such vociferous critiques
of IMF austerity economics as to (nearly) disguise his own previous advo-
cacy of deregulatory ‘shock therapy’ from Latin America to Eastern Europe
and his continuing promotion of sweatshops.12
Slightly more durable than the growing chorus of reform-oriented neo-
liberals were the institutions which have an actual material stake in promot-
ing human welfare, such as several key United Nations agencies. Some of
the main ones – the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the
International Labour Organisation, the World Health Organisation and
UNICEF – made regular appeals for state intervention and social entitle-
ments contrary to Washington’s gospel. But Kofi Annan did enormous
damage to his reputation, both through appointing a Washington-oriented
advisory team on international finance (chaired by Mexico’s controversial
ex-president Ernesto Zedillo and including Citibank co-chairperson Robert
Rubin), and through the UN’s ‘Global Compact’ with 50 of the world’s
largest companies.
In addition, the World Water Forum – a joint venture of the World Bank
and the United Nations Development Programme (itself run by Mark
Malloch Brown, Wolfensohn’s mid-1990s public relations man) – transpar-
ently promoted the commodification/privatisation agenda at its key
meeting in March 2000 in the Hague. Without Ted Turner’s bailouts, the
UN would have even less capacity to withstand the varying pressures from
Washington – one day isolationist, but the next humanitarian-imperialist –
in any case. ‘Can the UN be salvaged?’ asked the International Forum on
Globalisation grouping of leading international left-liberals during the
Millennium Summit in September 2000, and failed to answer conclusively
in the affirmative.
More potentially significant than any of the above were the shifting
political sands of social-democratic and Green or otherwise left-leaning
party politics in Germany, France, Italy and Japan.13 Still, when Oskar
Lafontaine, the reform-minded social democrat, resigned his finance
ministry post in disgust in early 1999,14 Schroeder realigned Germany away
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 100
from Paris – at least, away from Lionel Jospin’s wing of socialism – and
towards London, and hence Washington. At the same time, Tokyo, led by
Miyazawa, was prevented from establishing the Asian Monetary Fund it
wanted during the late 1990s because of Rubin/Summers vetoes.15 Whether
Japan and Europe would rise again to challenge Washington probably
depended mostly upon whether a US-led global recession would change the
balance of forces and reduce dependence upon Washington’s economic
dictates.
All of the forces and ideologies cited above were, however, fundamen-
tally guided by an acceptance of Western consumption norms and habits, a
hostility (sometimes verging on the lunatic) to socialist values and a
tendency to paint economics in the narrowest and most technical terms. So
any rearrangement of personnel by the Bush administration or potential
minor reforms – even slight downsizing – of the Washington institutions
would not make much difference. The pro-status-quo forces had no plan to
restore either international financial stability or Third World prospects for
capital accumulation envisaged at the original Bretton Woods conference in
1944.
Meanwhile, the US economy continued to suffer unprecedented trade
and debt imbalances, unprecedented consumer and corporate borrowing,
and persistent stock-market overvaluation (on the NY Stock Exchange, if
not Nasdaq, which crashed violently from March 2000). Japan’s apparent
break from its decade-long stagnation in early 1999 was brief, with a down-
turn soon returning. The rapid recovery of the East Asian countries from
system-threatening crisis contributed yet further to the more durable trade
and investment imbalances, with no sign of the more balanced character of
capital accumulation so desperately required. Were there, in this dangerous
context, any feasible systematic reforms worth promoting by intelligent
progressives, or would the powers-that-be in Washington and other finan-
cial capitals necessarily drive the financial system off the economic cliff
early in the 21st century?
What might work

The lack of a sufficient international political will for a more durable anti-
dote – such as a revival of what has been termed ‘global Keynesianism’ –
was disturbing and somewhat surprising, given how much was at stake.
George Soros predicted in early 2001: ‘The last crisis [1997–9] was the
product of a boom of investments in emerging markets, followed by a very
steep fall. Now the problem that the world faces is inadequate capital flows
from countries at the center to countries on the periphery. It is going to be
a chronic, not a temporary crisis, and I believe it is already underway.’16
Under not dissimilar circumstances during the Great Depression,
Keynes offered a philosophically grounded economic diagnosis in his 1936
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 101
General Theory, based on the disjuncture between savings and investment

that recurs periodically under capitalism. He also suggested a remedy to
depression-ridden capitalism that, from the early 1940s, revolutionised
economic thinking for a period of more than three, relatively high-growth,
relatively less-unequal decades. He considered that remedy to lie in fiscal
expansion, but just as crucial for him was the proper control of flows of
financial capital. Keynes insisted that a footloose flow of capital ‘assumes
that it is right and desirable to have an equalisation of interest rates in all
parts of the world. In my view the whole management of the domestic econ-
omy depends upon being free to have the appropriate interest rate without
reference to the rates prevailing in the rest of the world. Capital controls is
a corollary to this.’17
Thanks largely to Keynes, who argued in 1944 against the American
negotiating team at Bretton Woods, the IMF Articles of Agreement still
allow member countries to ‘exercise such controls as are necessary to regu-
late international capital movements’. As recently as 1990, 35 countries
retained capital controls. I will look at this matter again in Chapter twelve.
But from the early 1990s, the US Treasury Department led a formidable
attack on this provision, and not only forced South Korea’s financial doors
open as a condition for it joining the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development, but even attempted to change the IMF
Articles of Agreement to ensure that all member states agreed to full
financial liberalisation.
At the global level, meanwhile, Washington continued to ward off any
systematic protective measures against the dangers of financial speculation
and contagion, notwithstanding a series of calls by respected economists for
crucial technical interventions. One remedy for global crisis contagion – en-
dorsed in March 1999 by a two-thirds majority in the Canadian parliament –
is the application by the major countries of a ‘Tobin Tax’ (bearing the name
of Nobel Prize laureate James Tobin) of 0.05–0.50% on cross-border finan-
cial transactions.18 Noted futurist Hazel Henderson has also suggested
creative means to prevent currency ‘bear raids’ by focusing on electronic
funds transfers and a transparent transaction-reporting system.19
To concerns that money would flee the major countries for off-shore
centres (the Bahamas, Jersey, Guernsey, the Cayman Islands, Panama, etc.),
advocates of the Tobin Tax insist that any funds flowing to or from such
sites could be penalised by concerted G-8 country action.20 To concerns
that the rise of trade in derivatives and other financial innovations would
make a Tobin Tax difficult to apply,21 advocates suggest taxing profits or
losses through a ‘contract for differences’ payment mechanism, realised as
a result of movements of the exchange rate relative to the notional princi-
pal amounts traded. In other words, logistical hurdles can be overcome.
Establishing the European Union’s common currency was, after all, a far
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 102
more difficult technical exercise, yet was accomplished with few problems
because there was sufficient political will. (It is, however, widely recognised
that a Tobin Tax is simply defensive, and that other investment measures
are needed to assure a more appropriate flow of finance to areas of poten-
tial economic – not merely speculative – return.)
Similarly, other proposals for international financial regulation, ideally
co-ordinated by a United Nations system agency, have gone unheeded. Sir
John Eatwell and Lance Taylor advocated the establishment of a World
Financial Authority.22 The ‘post-Keynesian’ economist Paul Davidson pro-
posed an international clearing union providing for capital controls.23 The
leading UNCTAD economist, Yilmaz Akyuz, made similar calls.24 Other
far-sighted US economists – Jane D’Arista, James Galbraith, William Darity
and Dean Baker of the Financial Markets Center in Washington – suggest-
ed a new international public bank and regulatory framework.25
In addition, in view not only of further currency crashes that compel
interest-rate increases that in turn bankrupt many local borrowers, but also
of a legitimate fear of continuing sovereign defaults (like Russia’s of August
1998, as well as South Africa’s standstill of September 1985 and Brazil’s of
1987), UNCTAD suggested extending some form of national bankruptcy
procedure (along the lines of the US Bankruptcy Code, Chapters 9 and 11)
on the international level.26 Fears remained, however, that if a bankruptcy
arbitration panel is influenced by the IMF, serious conflicts of interest
would arise, given that the IMF itself is typically a central creditor in all
such cases. And the question of whether the UN system could generate
such a panel cannot be answered in the affirmative unless there is a
dramatic shift in power balances and an increase in political will.
Reflecting the concern among at least a few left-leaning Northern parlia-
mentarians that existing financial regulatory measures at the national and
international levels are insufficient, a motion tabled in the German
Bundestag in May 1999 by the Party of Democratic Socialism called upon
the government to take measures that included the following:
1) within the G8 framework, to take steps to curb short-term speculation on

the financial markets, inter alia through a combination of the following
measures:
by introducing a currency exchange transactions tax (Tobin Tax). All
transactions which result in an immediate exchange of currency must
be taxed at a standard proportional rate of 0.25% on the full volume
of their monetary value;
by introducing special compulsory minimum reserves for non-project-
specific bank credits, i.e. for bank loans which are not earmarked for
specific purposes (e.g. the purchase of consumer goods, investments,
trade finance etc.). As speculation is generally undertaken with
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 103
borrowed rather than own funds, it may be assumed that these credits
– especially to hedge and investment funds – are used primarily for
short-term financial speculation. The banks will pass on the costs of
holding the reserves to borrowers, thereby pushing up the price of the
financial commitment and reducing the investment;
imposing a charge on non-interest-bearing or low-interest cash
deposits when importing or exporting capital, thus adding more to the
cost of such transactions than the percentage levied by a Tobin Tax. A
sliding scale of charges may be imposed in line with the type and/or the
term of capital flows: high rates would apply to short-term, high-risk
accounts, while low rates would be charged on long-term, lower-risk
investments.
2) with the objective of improving banking supervision, to take initiatives:

to enhance transparency by ensuring that off-balance sheet transac-
tions (especially with derivatives) are identified and included in risk
calculations;
to tighten the own capital regulations for banks and extend them to all
types of financial institution. The assessment and calculation of credit
risks must no longer be left to these institutions – as has hitherto been
the case – as this reduces the own capital security of the credit opera-
tion. The own capital regulations for credit institutions must be
applied more rigorously to derivatives transactions, and risk-weighted
minimum reserves must be introduced for transactions by investment
funds;
to introduce compulsory insurance for international loans, so that
private risks are insured on a private basis and losses are no longer
passed on to the tax payer, as is the current practice;
to abolish offshore finance centres, or to penalize banks and financial
institutions which do business with these offshore centres.27
Related areas of nation-state intervention, such as prohibiting certain kinds

of deregulated financial market activity, would also be appropriate. Indeed,
a gathering of left-wing reformers at the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington in December 1998 established a variety of other approaches,
such as proposed regional-crisis funds belonging to a manageable set of
countries with similar norms, values and practices, and domestic
redirection of locally raised monies (hence ‘soft currency’ in many cases,
intermediated by worker-influenced pension funds or mutual funds), along
with progressive national taxation.28
Perhaps surprisingly, proposals for national and supranational inter-
ventions against cross-border financial flows are not terribly controversial
in the economics profession, given the damage done over the past quarter
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 104
of a century. To a lesser degree, such intervention has been endorsed by the

three most active Washington economists of the late 1990s: Summers,
Fischer and Stiglitz. Most notably, Summers even co-authored an academic
article recommending a tax on global financial speculation.29 Fischer
argued as recently as 1991 that ‘domestic firms should not be given un-
restricted access to foreign borrowing, particularly non-equity financing’.30
Likewise, Stiglitz once advocated a tax-based approach to cooling hot
money.31 So the idea that both Washington and Post-Washington
Consensusites could imagine the reforms required to at least stabilise global
capitalism was in no way outlandish.
However, there is a vast distance between obscure articles destined for
audiences of economists and the professional requirements associated with
maintaining imperialist financial interests. Given the enormous hostility of
Wall Street, the City of London and other European financial centres, the
prospect of any global regulatory agency emerging to gain control of finan-
cial flows in the manner that Keynes envisaged is remote.
If this is true, then it is the nation state that must intervene to assure
domestic financial security, in an increasingly dangerous world in which
global financial management is simply inadequate and power relations
are unlikely to change to bring international finance to heel. But the
question that arises next is whether Third World nationalists are
prepared to take such steps, or whether radical social movements have to
push them. South Africa is a case in point, as we will observe in the next
two chapters.
3. Forces for change (?)

Third World nationalism
The fourth of the five groups under discussion, Third World nationalists,
cannot claim to share traditions in any respect. Some nationalists have been
effective in keeping international financial pressure at bay during the 1990s.
China and India forthrightly resisted financial liberalisation. The Chinese-
ruled statelet of Hong Kong controversially prohibited the short selling of
local stock-market shares in September 1998, and also bought $14 billion
in shares to prop up the Hang Seng index. At the same time, Taiwan
outlawed what were described as illegal funds-trades by Soros hedge funds.
All of these countries survived the Asian financial crisis of 1997–9. And
though his economy was being put through the wringer, Boris Yeltsin
formally defaulted on $40 billion worth of domestic Russian state debt
(30-day bonds carrying triple-digit interest rates) held to a large extent by
foreigners in August 1998.32
But it was in rather different nationalist regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin
America that more radical discourses of opposition to the Washington
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 105
Consensus were heard at the turn of the century. From Malaysia

(Mahathir)33 to Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe),34 to Venezuela (Hugo
Chavez),35 IMF-bashing was back in style, even if the rhetorical flourishes
had different origins, i.e. one Muslim, one self-described socialist, one
simply populist. Other interesting – if flawed – Third World leaders
included Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo,
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and South Africa’s elite economic team, whose
ideas and agenda are discussed in the next two chapters.36
Could these diverse forces find a way to build unity against Washington?
Fidel Castro’s hosting of the G-77 South Summit in April 2000 generated a
quite progressive ‘Havana Programme of Action’ (Castro even called for
the closure of the IMF), but its approach was clearly in the spirit that ‘we
want in’ to global financial capitalism. ‘We emphasize the importance of the
effective and beneficial integration of the LDCs into the global economy
and the multilateral trading system as its main driving force’, said the G-77
communiqué, through ‘reform of the international financial architecture
that addresses issues of financing for development and stability of the inter-
national financial system including the need for regulation of hedge funds
and highly leveraged institutions and strengthening of the early warning
system to provide for improved response capabilities to help countries deal
with the emergencies and spread of financial crises.’37
The approach chosen in these cases amounts mainly to attempting to join
the system, to play by its rules and, having discovered that the game is set
up unfairly, to adjust these rules somewhat in the Third World’s favour.
Recall in contrast the demand in the 1970s by the governments of these
same countries for a ‘New International Economic Order’. This strain of
politics faded badly over the subsequent two decades. And in the cases of
Mahathir, Mugabe and others, ‘talking left’ also entailed repression of
opposition parties, public interest groups, trade unions, women and gay-
rights movements, which was less publicised but just as chilling to demo-
cratic processes as the arrest of a high-ranking Malaysian politician who
supported the Washington Consensus, and the terrorising of Zimbabwean
journalists and white commercial farmers.38
Not just a problem of Third World nationalism, selling out the poor and
working classes on behalf of international finance was also the general fate
of so many labour and social-democratic parties in Western Europe,
Canada and Australia. Even where once-revolutionary parties remained in
control of the nation state – in China, Vietnam, Angola and Mozambique,
for example – ideologies wandered over to hard, raw capitalism. And yet,
too, the very universality of financial crisis would necessarily allow counter-
hegemonic voices to emerge. Thus there was still talk within the African
National Congress of potential interlocking interests of many nations –
Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Mexico, Pakistan,
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 106
Russia – which would potentially reflect renewed muscle in the Non-

Aligned Movement, Group of 77 and various other forums of revived
nationalisms.
Global justice movements

Finally, a variety of radical social movements adopted a relatively harmo-
nious goal (which I will consider in much greater detail in Chapters ten and
eleven), namely to promote the globalisation of people and halt or at least
radically modify the globalisation of capital. These movements spanned Old
Left forces (many labour movements and some ex-Stalinist communist
parties),39 other newer political parties,40 progressive churches, human-
rights and disarmament movements, democracy activists, urban/rural-
community and indigenous-peoples movements, organisations of women,
youth and the elderly, HIV and health activists, disability-rights lobbyists,
consumer advocates and environmentalists who work on both the local and
global levels (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in the latter group,
along with international environmental-justice networks).
Naturally, these movements are all extremely diverse in all aspects of
their existence. Were there any discourses that could combine the mass-
based movements and the NGOs, the proletarian (or often lumpen)
activists and petit-bourgeois intellectuals, the women and the men, the envi-
ronmentalists and the workers? In both strategic and tactical respects,
achieving a synthesis of particularist struggles is always difficult, not least in
the simple matter of movement leaders and activists even finding common
and mutually supportive discourses. Nevertheless, by the turn of the
century, virtually all countries provided evidence of coalitions and networks
of anti-globalisation activists, many of which were fairly well-grounded in
mass democratic organisations that acted locally but thought globally.41
Some localised efforts were already having inspiring results, such as anti-
dam struggles in parts of South Asia and the unveiling of Chile’s repressive
legacy as part of an international campaign to bring General Pinochet to
justice. But it was always vital to question whether these sorts of organisa-
tions could forge links, so as not only to think globally and act locally, but
also act globally.42 The most successful of these groups during the late 1990s
tackled three global issues: landmines (nearly victoriously were it not for the
United States), the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (where several
stunning stalemates were won, mainly in European settings) and Third
World debt. Indeed, it was possible to locate within the Jubilee 2000 debt-
cancellation movement a campaigning spirit that attracted celebrities
ranging from the Pope, to singer Bono of the group U2, to Bob Geldoff, to
Muhamad Ali, but also drew tens of thousands of ordinary activists to
protest at G-8 meetings in Birmingham in 1998, Cologne in 1999 and
Okinawa in 2000.43
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 107
Not only did social movements show that in some settings they could
move from marginal sideline protest to shake ruling-class confidence in
major neo-liberal initiatives, e.g. the North American Free Trade
Agreement and US support for the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade were threatened more by radical US farmer and labour activists than
by the Republican right-populists. They also claimed quite substantial
resources for future struggles, including effective advocacy networks44 and
a few progressive nerve centres in sites of power, particularly Washington,
DC.45 There were, in addition, several radical economic think-tanks
associated with the social movements,46 university allies,47 and a handful of
accessible international activist-oriented periodicals48 and publishing
houses,49 not to mention world-class spokespeople and luminaries from the
new movements who easily outwit conservative debating opponents.50
However, the global balance of forces is very clearly weighted against
Third World nationalists and the global justice movements, and there
appears little real basis for any forms of alliance between the two, given the
former’s penchant for authoritarianism and patriarchy. There is also a
variety of other important, organised social forces such as Muslim funda-
mentalist oppositionists, Andean guerrillas or still-stodgy US trade union-
ists51 that don’t fit neatly into any camp as yet, but which may influence
matters to some degree.
4. Alliances falter
Between the full-blown emergence of the international financial crisis
around mid-1997 (although the full extent of contagion was only felt a year
later) and the onset of a US recession in early 2001, roughly 40 months
transpired of give-and-take, mass protests, negotiating sessions and produc-
tion of reams of paper (and even more kilobytes of cyberspace argument),
all devoted to making the case that only one camp had it right. Although a
few momentary initiatives were made to explore alliances – or at least non-
aggression pacts – these petered out, and the five competing blocks grew
more divided than ever.
Not that there weren’t interesting possibilities for co-operation between
the camps, and, as we shall see in Chapters ten and eleven, perpetual
internecine conflict amongst organisations representing the oppressed. But
the opportunities for truly uniting forces were few and far between, and the
best that various groups could hope for was a temporary non-aggression
pact here or there.52
Washington makes no deals, takes no prisoners

Powerful and influential Washington Consensus exponents, for example,
practically exterminated their intellectual opponents on the Post-
Washington Consensus left, beginning in September 1999. After Stiglitz
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 108
raved at IMF incompetence in Russia, he was effectively dismissed – as

Jagdish Bhagwati put it in the Financial Times – ‘with a fig leaf, a sorry
episode’.53 Wolfensohn first censured and then censored Stiglitz in
October, weakly rebutting his critique of the IMF and then apparently
prohibiting him from press comment, according to the Washington Post.
Ironically, perhaps as an epitaph, Stiglitz’s disciplinary credentials were
endorsed in the New York Times by Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow
(Summers’ father-in-law): ‘The Stiglitz group represents one of the most
important innovations in economics in the last 100 years.’ Soon thereafter,
Ravi Kanbur – the World Bank’s redistribution-minded consultant who was
to be lead author of World Development Report: Poverty 2000 – also
resigned because of explicit censorship by Summers.
Camdessus’ resignation in early 2000 also reflected institutional
embarrassment (‘I never signed a Washington Consensus’,54 he cried in
Bangkok, shortly after receiving a creampuff pie in his face from a leading
global-justice-movement veteran, Robert Naiman). As one reflection of
tensions within the international movement, Jubilee 2000 UK sought the
approval of the Pope for its (limited) anti-debt campaigning, while the Pope
sought Camdessus as an advisor. Jubilee’s UK and US chapters also called
for help to Sachs on a regular basis, notwithstanding the Russian financial
scandal that festered at his Harvard institute and his tendency to still preach
the virtues of sweatshops in Third World countries. In a similar reflection
of untenable alliance-building, Bono met Wolfensohn at the meeting in
Prague in September 2000 and inexplicably rewarded the World Bank pres-
ident with the title ‘the Elvis of economics’.55 But there was no apparent
benefit to Jubilee, just more World Bank stonewalling on debt.
Washington’s hegemony continued. Minor reforms to global financial-
market regulation announced at the G-8 meeting in Cologne and the
IMF/World Bank annual meetings held in 1999 were not, by virtually all
accounts, sufficient to prevent a future wave of financial panics. Debt relief
promised in Cologne was simply ignored by most of the G-8 finance minis-
ters. Only the right-wing threat forced an occasional modification here or
there, especially when Sachs temporarily allied with conservative populists
on the Meltzer Commission, instead of with the commission’s corporate
liberals, who the Democratic Party had deployed to win the arguments.
Other alliances?
Meanwhile, the conservative members of the US Congress and right-wing
populists everywhere enviously realised that when it came to mass mobili-
sation around international financial and trade matters, the Right had
nothing like the capacity shown by the Left in Seattle, Washington and
Prague. One deal that brought the protesters’ Washington technocrats
together with creative Republicans was a successful effort in October 2000
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 109
to prevent the World Bank and IMF from imposing user fees on healthcare
and education in future loan conditions.
The global justice movements did earn occasional acknowledgement
from the elite. On the verge of leaving the World Bank in early April 2000,
Stiglitz praised the street protesters. But that too was a stillborn friendship,
as Stiglitz was quickly sucked into an elite-intellectual exercise on ‘the
alternative’ (funded, predictably, by Ford) at Brookings, Stanford and
Ottawa’s North-South Institute, which didn’t give the global justice move-
ments a second thought. But likewise, few on the Left saw Stiglitz’s
contorted rebuilding of neo-classical economics through ‘information-
theoretic’ augmentations as a worthwhile exercise, when their champion
was so obviously now out of the power loop.
Some leftists tried reaching out a bit to the nationalists, with Noam
Chomsky praising the Havana Summit,56 and internationalist activists –
from Global Exchange, Ruckus Society and other groups, organised by a
small group with excellent e-mail contacts, United Peoples – concluding in
mid-2000 that alliances with Southern rulers are possible: ‘With regard to
the fundamental debt cancellation and fair trade issues, the G77 summit in
Havana once again confirmed the accordance between the views of the G77
and the new worldwide anti-globalization movement that protested
WTO/IMF/World Bank in Seattle and Washington. A cooperation
between the two parties therefore would seem appropriate in order to
achieve our common goals in the most efficient and speedy way.’57
Again, this came to nothing as nationalists looked for relief instead to
sites of power, not to disruptive left-wing groups with which they too
experienced regular friction. Some Third Worldists were heartened by
grudging elite acknowledgements in September 1999, led by Stiglitz but
joined too by IMF researchers, that the previous year’s Malaysian currency
controls were effective medicine. But efforts by Mahathir to gather like-
minded world leaders both at home and, by invitation of Mugabe, at
Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls, had no apparent success in expanding the
nationalist current. (South Africa, for example, was distinctly uninterested
in nationalist-type financial boat-rocking.)
And looming still, as potentially a denouement to financial power – and in
turn as the creator of space required to re-establish national economic sover-
eignty – was the likelihood of a further financial ‘correction’. The next time,
all observers either feared (or hoped), the epicentre would be the US, whose
capacity to suck in foreign goods on credit gave the appearance of superficial
glitter, while economic fundamentals were in fact rotting underneath. As I
discussed in Chapter one, that country’s trade deficit, foreign debt, domestic
corporate and consumer debt, and asset inflation all stood at unprecedented
levels at the turn of the century. The buildup of financial stresses in the
global economy – and the balance of forces that accommodated these
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 110
stresses – could surely not be sustained forever. It would then be a matter of

shifting the alliances and mobilising the activists to confront an extraordi-
nary combination of financial power and vulnerability.
But does the South African government see it this way?
Notes
1 In an important overview of the debate over global financial reform, Walden Bello,
Kamal Malhotra, Nicola Bullard and Marco Mezzera argue (in ‘Notes on the
Ascendancy and Regulation of Speculative Capital,’ paper presented to the confer-
ence on ‘Economic Sovereignty in a Globalized World’, Bangkok, 24 March 1999)
that there are three tendencies of global financial reform: ‘It’s the wiring, not the
architecture’ (the Washington Consensus plus Group of 22); ‘Back to Bretton
Woods’ (a strong version of the Post-Washington Consensus); and ‘It’s the develop-
ment model, stupid!’ (global justice movements) – ignoring the resurgent US right-
wing critique, and also collapsing nationalists and Post-Washington Consensus
economists into the second category.
2 The term ‘Washington Consensus’ comes from John Williamson (1990), ‘The
Progress of Policy Reform in Latin America’, Policy Analyses in International
Economics, Washington, DC, Institute for International Economics. As one minor
personal indication of the awesome power invested in Washington Consensus
leaders, Time magazine (15 February 1999) anointed Rubin, Summers and
Greenspan the ‘Three Marketeers’ who could save the world from depression.
The arrogance of Consensus-think was evident in Camdessus’ description of the
Asian crisis as a ‘blessing in disguise’ (Wall Street Journal, 24 September 1998).
Illustrative of crisis-era justifications are articles and speeches by Robert Rubin (1998),
‘Strengthening the Architecture of the International Financial System’, remarks to the
Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 14 April; by Laurence Summers (1998), ‘The
Global Economic Situation and What it Means for the United States’, remarks to the
National Governors’ Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 4 August; by Stanley
Fischer (1997), ‘IMF – The Right Stuff’, Financial Times, 17 December; (1998), ‘In
Defence of the IMF: Specialized Tools for a Specialized Task’, Foreign Affairs, July-
August, and (1999), ‘On the Need for an International Lender of Last Resort’, IMF
mimeo, Washington, DC, 3 January; and by Michel Camdessus (1998), ‘The IMF and
its Programs in Asia’, remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York,
6 February. See also the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(1998), Report of the Working Group on International Financial Crises, Paris.
It is tempting to place South Africa’s government in the Washington Consensus
grouping, given the evidence of how much elites like Mbeki, Manuel and Erwin
celebrated their homegrown adoption of Washington-friendly austerity policies. But
this would be to jump ahead of evidence to the contrary, as I will discuss below.
3 Wolfensohn, J. (1999), ‘A Proposal for a Comprehensive Development Framework
(A Discussion Draft)’, Washington, DC, World Bank, 29 January.
4 Dornbush, cited in Doug Henwood (1999), ‘Marxing up the Millennium’, paper
presented to the ‘Marx at the Millennium’ conference, University of Florida,
19 March.
5 For a good description, see Leaver, R. (1999), ‘Moral (and Other) Hazards: The IMF
and the Systematic Asian Crisis’, paper presented to the conference on ‘Economic
Sovereignty in a Globalizing World’, Bangkok, 24 March. For their own words, see
Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/research/glob-st.html; Henry Kissinger (1998),
‘IMF no Longer Able to Deal with Economic Crises’, Los Angeles Times, 4 October;
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 111
Shultz, G., Simon, W. and Wriston, W. (1998), ‘Who Needs the IMF?’, Wall Street
Journal, 3 February.
6 Yonan, A. (2000), ‘Bush seen Pushing IMF toward less Interventionist Role’, Dow
Jones newswires, December 20.
7 Wall Street Journal, 20 March 2000.
8 Franke-Ruta, G. (1998), ‘The IMF Gets a Left and a Right’, The National Journal,
30(3).
9 Stiglitz, J. (1998), ‘More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward a Post-
Washington Consensus’, WIDER Annual Lecture, Helsinki, 7 January.
10 In a perceptive review of the 1998 book, Doug Henwood (‘Let George Do It’, Left
Business Observer, 88, February 1999) argues that Soros has lifted unattributed
arguments about financial-market disequilibrium (‘nonergodicity’) from Paul
Davidson, the post-Keynesian economist, and that his analysis is far less convincing
in these matters than Keynes, Joan Robinson, Karl Polanyi and Hyman Minsky, who
pioneered theories of imperfect financial markets long before Stiglitz. (Stiglitz told
me personally that he did not take Soros’ ideas terribly seriously, for he saw Soros
mainly as a practitioner with insufficient intellectual distance; interview, 1 October
1998, Ottawa.)
Most tellingly, Soros’ solutions wilt when it comes to national exchange controls,
at a time when honest economists were reviewing this once widely practiced tech-
nique as part of the solution to financial market turbulence – and at a time when
Stiglitz, who initially worried that the Malaysian exchange controls of September
1998 represented ‘too much of a backlash’, prepared to endorse Malaysia’s controls.
(He told me three weeks later that he preferred dual-currency controls like South
Africa’s finrand of 1985–95.) After all, Stiglitz conceded in mid-1999, ‘There was no
adverse effect on direct foreign investment … there may even have been a slight
upsurge at some point’ (Agence France-Presse, 23 June 1999). Soros, whose famous
tiff with an evidently anti-semitic Mohamad bin Mahathir in 1997–8 may have in-
fluenced matters (Economist, 27 September 1997), shied well away from exchange
controls, for if widespread, these would end his speculating days. And as Henwood
(op. cit.) concludes of Soros’ insurance proposal, ‘Making creditors bear the risk of
lending beyond sanctioned limits might not do all that much’ to cool down hot
money flows in any event.
11 Krugman, P. (1998), ‘Saving Asia: It’s Time to get RADICAL’, Fortune, 7 September.
12 Sachs, J. (1997), ‘The IMF is a Power unto Itself’, Financial Times, 11 December;
(1998), ‘The IMF and the Asian Flu’, The American Prospect, March-April.
13 With its own occasional Post-Washington Consensus rhetoric, South Africa, too,
watched and waited, as I will show in the next two chapters. Sweden and Chile were
meant to be new-and-improved social-democratic allies, though there was little real
evidence of any practical application of such a grouping.
14 Lafontaine was also Old Left, and possibly belongs not in the Post-Washington cate-
gory, but rather amongst global justice movements, in part because a key advisor was
the Berlin Free University’s famous Marxist economist, Elmar Altvater. See
Lafontaine O. and Mueller, C. (1998), Keine Angst vor der Globalisierung: Wohl-
stand und Arbeit für Alle, Bonn, Dietz Verlag.
15 Hitoshi, H. (1999), ‘The Asian Monetary Fund and the Miyazawa Initiative’, paper
presented to the conference on ‘Economic Sovereignty in a Globalizing World’,
Bangkok, 24 March.
16 Reuters, 2 January 2001.
17 See D. Moggeridge (ed.), The Collected Works of J. M. Keynes, vol. 25, London,
Macmillan, p. 149.
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 112
18 Tobin, J. (1978), ‘A Proposal for International Monetary Reform’, The Eastern Eco-
nomic Journal, 4, July/October; Eichengreen, B., Tobin J. and Wyplosz, C. (1995),
‘Two Cases for Sand in the Wheels of International Finance’, Economic Journal, 105;
and Tobin, J. (1996) in M. ul Haq, I. Kaul and I. Grunberg (eds), The Tobin Tax:
Coping with Financial Volatility, New York, Oxford University Press. See also Felix,
D. (1995), ‘Financial Globalization vs. Free Trade: The Case for the Tobin Tax’,
Geneva, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development discussion paper
no. 108.
19 Henderson, H. (1996), Building a Win-Win World, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
20 In 1990, the Bank for International Settlements Committee on Interbank Netting
Schemes of the Central Banks of the Group of Ten Countries agreed on the
‘Lamfalussy Minimum Standards’ for regulation of such flows, for example, by
taxing transactions that are registered through the Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT, the primary commercial bank
clearing mechanism), which now incorporates netting done through the Exchange
Clearing House Organization and Multinet International Bank. See Bank for
International Settlements (1990), The Lamfalussy Report: Report of the Committee
on Interbank Netting Schemes of the Central Banks of the Group of Ten Countries,
Basle.
21 Garber, P. and Taylor, M. (1995), ‘Sand in the Wheels of Foreign Exchange Markets:
A Sceptical Note’, The Economic Journal, 105; Garber, P. (1998), ‘Derivatives in
International Capital Flow’, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper
no. 6623, New York.
22 Eatwell, J. and Taylor, L. (1998), ‘International Capital Markets and the Future of
Economic Policy’, CEPA Working Paper Series III, working paper no. 9, New School
for Social Research, New York, September.
23 Davidson, P. (1997), ‘Are Grains of Sand in the Wheels of International Finance
Sufficient to do the Job when Boulders are often Required?’ The Economic Journal,
107, and (1998), ‘The Case for Regulating International Capital Flows’, paper
presented at the Social Market Foundation Seminar on Regulation of Capital
Movements, 17 November.
24 Akyuz, Y. (1995), ‘Taming International Finance,’ in J. Michie and J. G. Smith (eds),
Managing the Global Economy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, and (1998), ‘The
East Asian Financial Crisis: Back to the Future’, in K. S. Jomo (ed.), Tigers in
Trouble, London, Zed.
25 See http://www.fmcenter.org.
26 Instead of shutting down municipalities and companies or bankrupting consumers
who have liquidity problems, such procedures attempt to resolve the problems
through restructuring. This makes them relevant to foreign debt negotiations. In its
1998 Trade and Development Report, UNCTAD proposed the establishment of an
independent panel to determine when a country under attack by speculators can be
permitted to impose exchange or capital controls (including debt standstills), consis-
tent with the IMF’s Article VIII, section 2(b).
27 PDS Parliamentary Group (1999), ‘A social and democratic world economic system
in place of neo-liberal globalization’, printed paper 14/954, German Bundestag,
Bonn, 4 May.
28 For details, see Anderson, S., Cavanagh, J. and Lee, T. (1999), Field Guide to the
World Economy, New York, The Free Press.
29 Summers, L. (1989), ‘When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A Cautious Case for
a Securities Transactions Tax’, Journal of Financial Services, 3.
30 Fischer, S. (1991), Issues in International Economic Integration, Bangkok, p. 20.
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 113
31 Stiglitz, J. (1989), ‘Using Tax Policy to Curb Speculative Short-Term Trading’,

Journal of Financial Services, 3.
32 In addition, trade negotiations witnessed periodic upsurges of Third World nation-
alism, especially in behind-the-scenes maneuvering at Seattle by the Organisation of
African Unity’s more nationalist trade ministers (mainly from Zimbabwe, Uganda
and Kenya, working directly against South Africa). The denial of consensus of these
ministers blocked the WTO in December 1999. Again, a year later at a meeting of
African trade ministers in Libreville, permission was denied Alec Erwin and WTO
officials to proceed with a new ‘comprehensive’ round. The main source of infor-
mation and support for the more nationalist-inclined African ministers was a
Harare-based NGO, Southern and Eastern African Trade, Information and
Negotitations Initiative, based at the UNDP, led by Yash Tandon, former Ugandan
minister of culture.
33 Mahathir, M. (1998), ‘The Future of Asia in a Globalized and Deregulated World’,
speech to the conference ‘The Future of Asia’, Tokyo, 4 June.
34 There was a confused flurry in early 1999 when Mugabe sought funding elsewhere
than the IMF. See, for example, ‘Zimbabwe Severs Ties with the IMF’, Wall Street
Journal, 12, April 1999 and AP Worldstream, ‘“We Won’t Cut Ties with IMF, World
Bank,” says Zimbabwe’, 12 April 1999. See also Chapter three, above.
35 The main controversies associated with the honeymoon period following his impres-
sive electoral victory in 1998 – on an anti-poverty campaign platform – were whether
the falling world oil price (leading to an estimated 4% decline in Venezuelan GDP
in 1999) would force budget and real wage cuts, and how quickly Chavez would
carry out his threat to impose a state of emergency. Within a month of taking office,
he cut the budget by 11% while denying he was already an IMF devotee, notwith-
standing some extra spending on public works programmes. While unions
demanded a 50% wage increase to keep pace with inflation, Chavez offered only
20% in a national tripartite bargaining forum, and, when that broke down, imposed
the negative real-wage deal on public-sector workers (see Reuters, ‘Venezuela not
Negotiating, just Talking to IMF’, 3 March 1999; Associated Press, ‘Venezuela faces
Severe Recession’, 4 March 1999).
36 There were occasional hints that the South African government could potentially
join progressive nationalists, were any to rise in protest at Washington economics.
But as I noted above, just as many other hints suggested that Mbeki, Manuel and
Erwin belonged with their Washington friends, and others gave the impression that
the ANC leaned more logically towards a Post-Washington Consensus ideology. The
only constant here, as we will see in the subsequent two chapters, was systematic
confusion and mixed signalling.
37 Group of 77 South Summit (2000), ‘Havana Programme of Action’, Havana,
10–14 April, http://www.g-77.org.
38 My forthcoming book analysing Mugabe’s degeneration is tentatively entitled
Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Catastrophic Combinations of Nationalism and Neoliberalism.
39 Some extent of popular backing was found amongst communist parties in the
Philippines, South Africa, Germany, parts of Eastern Europe and Cuba.
40 The most important of such parties were the Brazilian Workers Party, the
Nicaraguan Sandinistas and their allies of the São Paulo Forum in Latin America.
41 To cite only a few such mass movements which apparently worked well with other
local and global anti-neo-liberal initiatives – simply to give a flavour of this posi-
tion – there are Mexico’s Zapatistas (both the retreating army and the emerging
peasant and worker civil-society organisations, as I will describe in Chapter
eleven), Brazil’s Movement of the Landless, India’s National Alliance of People’s
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 114
Movements, Thailand’s Forum of the Poor and the Korean Confederation of

Trade Unions.
42 Again, by way of example, local struggles to make housing and food social entitle-
ments – expanding the sphere of human rights discourse beyond ‘first generation’
liberal political rights into more radical socio-economic spheres – were aggregated
into the Habitat International Coalition and FoodFirst International Action
Network. Other international networks had successes in banning the dumping and
incineration of toxic waste (Health Care without Harm). The Zapatista
‘Intergalactic Encounters for Humanity, Against Neoliberalism’ planted more
visionary seeds, as have growing anarchist-inspired networking and activism – epit-
omised by the civil disobedience of the impressive network inspired by Zapatismo
known as ‘Peoples’ Global Action’ – in London, Paris, Geneva, Davos, San
Francisco and other sites of Northern power. The most impressive activist move-
ment in the US is Direct Action Network, augmented by the Independent Media
Centers in various cities.
43 Admittedly, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter eleven, classic South-versus-
North sentiments arose not only in Jubilee 2000 critiques of the Washington
Consensus and the highly-conditional debt relief schemes on offer from
Washington, but also in Jubilee South critiques of their Northern advocacy coun-
terparts, who often appeared extremely pliant to the gambits of Northern politi-
cians. For an excellent article on this topic, see Dot Keet, ‘The International
Anti-Debt Campaign: An Activists’ View from the South, to Activists in the North’,
AIDC discussion document, http://www.aidc.org.za.
44 Again a handful of examples will suffice, e.g. the Third World Network based in
Penang and Accra, the environmental group Greenpeace and the International
Rivers Network in Berkeley.
45 Worth citing are the Nader organisations, the Alliance for Global Justice, the Center
for Economic Justice and the Center for International Environmental Law.
46 For example, Focus on the Global South in Bangkok, the Center for Economic
Policy and Research and Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC,
Amsterdam’s Transnational Institute and International Institute for Research and
Education.
47 Critical masses of radical political economists had amassed at Toronto’s York
University, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of
Massachusetts/Amherst, and American University in Washington.
48 In English, these included The Ecologist, Green-Left Weekly, International Socialism,
International Viewpoint, Left Business Observer, Links, Monthly Review, Multi-
national Monitor, New Internationalist, Red Pepper, Third World Resurgence and Z.
49 These included Pluto, Zed, Monthly Review Press, South End and Verso, amongst
just the English-language presses.
50 In the same illustrative spirit, some of the leading anti-neo-liberal spokespeople,
activist-leaders and leftist luminaries of the late 1990s deserve mention:
Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, Lula (Luis Ignacio da Silva) of the
Brazilian Workers Party, President Fidel Castro of Cuba, Urugayan writer Eduardo
Galeano, ex-diplomat Alejandro Bendana of Nicaragua, Camille Chalmers of the
Haitian anti-neo-liberal movement, Samir Amin of the World Forum for
Alternatives in Dakar, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, Kenyan leader of
the 50 Years is Enough coalition Njoki Njehu, South African poet Dennis Brutus of
the debt cancellation movement and Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of Cape
Town, Indian anti-dams and social movement campaigner Medha Patkar and her
ally, writer Arundhati Roy, Martin Khor of Third World Network in Penang, Indian
Chapter 5 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 115
feminist-scientist-environmentalist Vandana Shiva, Walden Bello of Focus on the

Global South, Australian journalist John Pilger, Russian intellectual Boris
Kagarlitsky, Susan George of the Transnational Institute, French intellectual Pierre
Bordieu and radical farmer Pierre Bove, Canadian anti-corporate writer Naomi
Klein, US consumer activist Ralph Nader, movement-builder Kevin Danaher and
US intellectual Noam Chomsky.
51 Within the AFL-CIO, the balance of forces was fluid, between right-wing populist
Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. of the teamsters and left-leaning former mineworker leader Rich
Trumka, with overall leader John Sweeney tending to conservatism and corporatism.
52 For example, Jeffrey Sachs promised Stiglitz and his World Bank colleagues a
breather from criticism. But not long after the latter’s departure, Sachs used the
Financial Times to call Wolfensohn a ‘master of deceit’ (12 October 2000).
53 This quotation, and the following one by Kenneth Arrow, appeared in the Left
Business Observer, February 2000.
54 See Bretton Woods Project newsletter at http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/update.
55 Ibid. This accolade referred, presumably, to the bloated, vain, self-destructive and
hallucinatory state in which the singer found himself not long before his death.
56 Chomsky, N. (2000), ‘Summits’, ZNet commentary, 17 July, http://www.zmag.org/.
57 http://www.unitedpeoples.net.
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 116
CHAPTER SIX
Ideology and global governance
1. Introduction
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon concluded, ‘For my part, the
deeper I enter into the culture and political circles the surer I am that the
great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.’1 So the ques-
tion to be asked is surely, Is there a coherent explanation and ideological
posture in relation to globalisation – indeed to ‘global apartheid’ – to be
found within the top echelons of the South African state and ruling party?
I pose the question because President Thabo Mbeki has made explicit
arguments to this effect. At a social-democratic youth gathering in July 2000
in Sweden, for example, he exhorted his listeners that:
Fundamental to the labour, social democratic, socialist and national libera-
tion movements from their very inception, is the adherence to the view that
the people must be their own liberators. These movements have therefore
always fought for democracy and, more than this, for the empowering of the
people to represent their own interests through their political parties and
through mass struggle … Democracy is about the exercise of political power
by the people themselves. As the organised representative of these masses,
the progressive movement cannot, on the basis that the market will decide
these issues, as [New York Times columnist Thomas] Friedman asserts,
abandon the struggle for the all-round and sustained betterment of the lives
of the people and the attainment of social justice. Accordingly, we have to
continue to treat the struggle against poverty, national and social exclusion
and marginalisation as fundamental to the objectives of socialist movement.2
Mbeki’s long-term objective in relation to globalisation may not, therefore,
appear to differ much from the project of ‘National Democratic Revolution’
established by the African National Congress at home. Yet both in South
African and on the international terrain, complexities and contradictions
quickly appear. South Africa has offered two major initiatives within the
global political-economic arena: reforming the embryonic world-state
system, and lending South African prestige and concrete assistance to
alleviating the plight of the African continent.
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 117
I DEOLOGY AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE 117
The first challenge, upon which all else hinges (and hence upon which
this analysis dwells at greatest length), has at least three component
strategies:
1) leading the launch of a new WTO round, in co-operation with select
semi-peripheral allies (such as Algeria, Brazil, China, Egypt, India,
Mexico, Nigeria and South Korea), to contest Northern protec-
tionism;
2) promoting the revitalisation of the IMF and World Bank by advocating
more democratic functioning (especially a higher voting share for
Africa), invoking a modified Post-Washington Consensus approach to
development, and demanding a larger volume of debt relief; and
3) rejuvenating the UN – apparently through seeking a permanent seat on
the Security Council – and associated agencies in key areas of inter-
national influence.
The second challenge entails the assertion of South Africa’s politico-

economic-military-diplomatic might in Africa, in at least six debates over:
1) the merits of interventions within Southern African countries to prop up
contested allied governments (unjustified when Zimbabwe enters the
Democratic Republic of the Congo but justified by Pretoria when South
Africa intervenes in Lesotho);
2) whether residual nationalist alliances should determine South Africa’s
posture towards Zimbabwe (for in spite of qualms from within the
ANC, Pretoria was ultimately extremely supportive of the Mugabe
regime);
3) the maximisation of South Africa’s formidable comparative advantages
of scale in manufactured exports to Africa (notwithstanding a serious
backlash by SADC partners);
4) the costs of African immigration to South Africa (a process still strongly
opposed and viciously punished by Pretoria);
5) the diminishing role of human rights in the making of foreign policy, as
witnessed in arms sales and both African and international deal-making;
and
6) the leadership of Mbeki, along with Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo and
Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in a proposed Millennium Africa
Programme concerning development, debt, investment and trade,
through the Davos World Economic Forum (first) and the Organisation
of African Unity, which aims to raise higher levels of aid, debt cancel-
lation and market access in exchange for governance-related condition-
ality.
Although it is beyond my immediate scope to address these extremely

complex issues, a prerequisite query can be posed: Is ideology required to
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 118
make sense of, and ultimately to justify, these interrelated tasks? After all,
the late 1990s witnessed a general global rethink of the neo-liberal free-
market philosophy, as a result of crises of international economic regulation
and growing global inequality. Even if it is still sometimes termed ‘social
democracy’, the modified ‘Third Way’ neo-liberalism practised by the
ruling parties of the United States from 1993 to 2000, Britain from 1997
and Germany from 1998 was virtually indistinguishable from the policies of
conservative predecessors – Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl – who launched
the global resurgence of corporate rule and attack on the social wage during
the 1980s.
Alan Zuege puts it in a way that is strikingly applicable to South Africa’s
own socio-economic strategy, which, in common with the Third Way,
seeks to adapt not just industrial and political structures, but social struc-
tures as well, to the imperative to compete and win in global markets. In
pursuit of this agenda, the so-called modernising left asks workers to trade
away what remains of their post-war entitlements of the chimerical promise
of participation in a global knowledge economy, and to buy into the new
industrial, distributional, and civic accords which purport to make it possi-
ble. But with the legacy of overaccumulation still unravelling and the ravages
of international competition unyielding, these reformist ‘bargains’ amount to
little more than a ‘negotiated’ path to austerity.3
Of course, no matter the similarity between ANC policy and this descrip-
tion, from ANC headquarters would come a robust denial that the ANC is
in lockstep with the neo-liberal economics and Third Way politics of
Clinton, Blair and Schroeder. Instead, Mbeki’s primary personal and
political-party challenge has been to ally with regimes like those in Sweden
and Chile that wear a post-neo-liberal face, and to project a new compas-
sion for marginalised people and countries that transcends the market. In
his Swedish speech, Mbeki clarified the ideological starting point of a
revived social democracy: ‘I believe that the question we should all ask
ourselves is whether it is the vox populi – the voice of the people – that is
the voice of God, or is it the voice of the market, that is the voice of God!’4
The voice of the people, or the voice of the market? Matters become infi-
nitely more nuanced once we consider not merely rhetorical claims, but
explanations and ideological underpinnings (see Section 2). To the extent
that an apolitical, technocratic reading is possible, Mbeki provides one (see
Section 3). The conclusion (Section 4) therefore enquires into aspects of
solidarity that follow from a modernisationist view of globalisation together
with a techno-economic ideology. In combination, these belie Mbeki’s talk
of ‘sustained betterment of the lives of the people and the attainment of
social justice’ – and, predictably, what we ultimately discover to be at stake
in the ideological debate over globalisation is merely vulgar self-interest.
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 119
2. Explaining globalisation
At the July 1998 Mercosur meetings of South American nations, Nelson
Mandela was heard to announce: ‘Globalization is a phenomenon that we
cannot deny. All we can do is accept it.’5 But just weeks later, the mood
within the highest circles of the ANC seemed to shift quite dramatically in
the opposite direction. (However, as I explain below, the ‘inevitability
thesis’ – and its corollary, the excuse that ‘globalisation made me do it!’ – is
still trotted out regularly when learned-helplessness posturing is required.)
Both Mbeki and then Mandela had scolded a major SA Communist
Party congress and a Cosatu executive committee in June–July of that year
for opposition to neo-liberalism. But whether because of the national elec-
tions pending in 1999 (requiring Tripartite Alliance reconciliation) or a
genuine change of heart, some flaps on the left of the broad ANC tent were
reopened within months, and communists and trade unionists streamed
back in.
The market as cannibal?

One of the catalysts was the elevation of South Africa to lead the Non-
Aligned Movement in September 1998. Mbeki’s plenary address to the
heads of state assembled in Durban that month included the comment that
‘the message that comes across is that the market is a cannibal which feeds
on its own offspring … we are showered with accolades for cooperating in
the effort to fatten ourselves for the kill’.6 The next month, a leading ANC
intellectual, Joel Netshitenzhe, complained in an official ruling-party docu-
ment entitled ‘The State, Property Relations and Social Transformation’
that South Africa was not attracting the foreign investment anticipated to
correspond with the requisite ‘sound’ economic policies:
If in the past the bourgeois state blatantly represented the interests of private
capital, today its enslavement is even the more pronounced, with its policies
and actions beholden to the whims of owners of stupendously large amounts
of capital which is in constant flight across stocks, currencies and state
boundaries. More often than not, governments even in the most advance
countries assert their role in the economy merely by ‘sending signals to the
markets’, which they can only second-guess. If in the past, the Bretton
Woods Institutions (the IMF and World Bank) and the World Trade
Organisation pursued the same interests as these powerful corporations and
governments, today their prescriptions are turned on their heads as ‘the
animal spirits’ sway moods in a set of motions that have no apparent rhythm
or logic. Yet there is rhythm and logic. It is the logic of unbridled pursuit of
profit which has little direct bearing to production …
What this in fact means is that, in terms of the broad array of economic
and social policy, information and even political integrity, the state has lost
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 120
much of its national sovereignty. This applies more so to developing

countries.7
The market’s damage could be understood not merely in moral terms, but
also as a self-destructive force, according to the Tripartite Alliance:
As the depth and relative durability of the crisis have become apparent, the
dominant economic paradigm (the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’) has
fallen into increasing disrepute … The dominant assumption in the 1990s
has been that alignment with globalization would guarantee economies more
or less uninterrupted growth. The paradigm of an endlessly expanding
global freeway, in which, to benefit, individual (and particularly developing)
economies simply had to take the standard macro-economic on-ramp (liber-
alisation, privatisation, deregulation, flexibility and a 3% budget deficit) is
now in crisis.8
Indeed, at that stage, the East Asian collapse was acute; financial-crisis
‘contagion’ had spread to Russia and then South Africa; controversial
Malaysian nationalist Mahathir bin Mohamad shocked the world by
successfully imposing exchange controls; and IMF and World Bank legiti-
macy had sunk to unprecedented lows.9 A bit of cheekiness was surely
justified, even if the attack implicated South Africa’s own macroeconomic
managers?
Development ideology
But to gain the requisite scepticism about the durability of the ANC
leadership’s attack on the global market requires a look at the underlying
philosophy Mbeki brings to development. For in his argumentation, Mbeki
carefully avoids drawing the obvious causal linkages between growing
wealth in one part of the world and growing poverty elsewhere. (Never is
such causality debated, and only rarely is it mentioned, but an unusual
example was trade and industry minister Alec Erwin’s throwaway comment
to parliament, just prior to the WTO debacle in Seattle, that ‘the mobility
of [financial] capital acts to further set back economic growth in the devel-
oping countries’.)10
When Mbeki does invoke arguments reminiscent of so-called ‘depend-
ency theory’ – i.e. that economic integration under conditions of global
corporate and financial domination entails the development of underdevel-
opment – so as to more explicitly challenge global elites, economic variables
are quickly obscured. The modus operandi becomes, simply, helplessness, of
the kind he expressed in a speech in May 2000 to the US foreign policy
establishment at Georgetown University in Washington:
Many of our countries, including all those on our Continent, do not have and
are unlikely to have in the foreseeable future, the strength themselves to
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 121
determine on their own what should happen to their economies. The more
they get integrated into the world economy, the further will this capacity be
reduced, making them more dependent on the rest of the world economy
with regard to meeting the challenge of ending poverty within their coun-
tries.11
‘[M]ore dependent on … the world economy’ – but by definition, in
Mbeki’s post-communist, pragmatic leadership dictionary, that shouldn’t be
a bad thing, and is certainly a necessary process. Indeed, in a speech at the
White House, Mbeki warmly endorsed the amplification of US-dominated,
corporate rule: ‘We are particularly pleased that the African Growth and
Opportunity Act has been signed.’12 But, looking carefully, there is never to
be found in Mbeki’s repertoire of explanations the notion, dangerous to the
neo-liberal stance, that the gulf between rich and poor widens precisely
because Northern capital enjoys an ever-growing capacity to source inputs ever
more cheaply from the South, thanks to asymmetric trade relations, debt
peonage and currency crashes generated by regular bouts of speculative
financial raiding.
That possibility, and the policy implications it suggests, can never be
considered, much less stated, in polite discourse. On the contrary, judging
from the Georgetown speech, Mbeki appears to have backpedaled from a
University of Sussex-era interest in dependency theory to ‘modernisation-
theory’ principles, by way of the notion of development ‘take-off’ pioneered
by US imperialist planner W. W. Rostow, and long ridiculed by the Left:
‘Relative to the needs of these countries, including our own, the world
economy disposes of sufficient capital resources whose injection into our
countries as long-term investment, would succeed to take us to the “take-
off stage” once spoken of in textbooks on development economics.’13
But to take off, under current global circumstances, requires access to
new technology. And to justify the freedom given to South African busi-
nesses since 1994 to import job-killing, capital-intensive machinery in a
context in which a vast number of South Africans still lack not only gainful
employment but also access to goods to fulfil their basic needs, in turn
requires a techno-economic perspective on globalisation.
3. Globalisation’s techno-economic fix?

There are diverse discourses in Mbeki’s circles about globalisation, as was
demonstrated in the paper entitled ‘The Global Economic Crisis and its
Implications for South Africa’ of October 1998 (see the opening paragraphs
of Chapter one). Recall the explanation that ‘it is precisely declining prof-
itability in the most advanced economies that has spurred the last quarter
of a century of intensified globalization’. Thus instead of the strength and
vitality of international capitalism that is to blame for globalisation’s march,
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 122
it is the system’s ‘overaccumulation crisis’ and its resulting desperate

attempt to reach out beyond stagnant home markets.
Joining the IT revolution

In contrast, a rather less-threatening strand of explanation seems to have
prevailed at least up to mid-2000. For Alec Erwin, speaking in February
2000 to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (the international
organisation over which he presided during the late 1990s), the motive
force was the power not of increasingly footloose corporate capital, but the
magic of IT:
In a sense to say the world is global is a trite proposition. There is a new
essence that we seek in the term globalization. It must surely be that we
increasingly experience our globe in a common real time. This emerges as
information technology links us. Knowledge of every type begins to flow so
that we can know each other instantaneously.
As a result everything else begins to move in a more rapid way. This
movement of knowledge has powerfully inserted itself into production
processes so that they move faster, with more precision, responding to
immense complexity in nanoseconds. Surely it is this complex real time
interaction that is the qualitatively new characteristic of globalization.
If this is the case then it cannot be reversed. To think this is possible is like
trying to prevent the spread of electricity because we fear being shocked
when we don’t take care.14
The same tone of inevitability was adopted in September 2000 by Nelson
Mandela, speaking to the British Labour Party’s convention:
Those who are saying they are not going to prepare for this phenomenon are
like saying ‘I don’t recognise winter, therefore I’m not going to buy clothing
for winter’.
We have our reservations about globalisation. We must certainly not be
afraid to condemn those aspects of globalisation which lead to more poverty
in the world. All human beings are born equal. They must be treated equally.
We would argue that the shrinking of the globe through the advances in
communications and information technology has made it even more incum-
bent upon us to become once more the keepers of our brothers and sisters.15
If globalisation is thus based on technological advance and not capitalist
crisis tendencies, harnessing IT for development must then become a
central objective. The G-8 meeting in Okinawa in July 2000 certainly
advanced this thesis. Mbeki warmly accepted the bona fides of the world
leaders, notwithstanding enormous disappointment expressed universally
that, quite evidently, substantial debt relief was off the G-8 agenda. To illus-
trate, argued Mbeki to a gathering of young civil-service leaders the same
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 123
month: ‘Technology by itself, will not necessarily eradicate poverty, nor will
it end underdevelopment. Yet, the availability of technology and its dissem-
ination amongst many sectors of society, is a critically necessary condition
for economic and social development.’16
The most poignant reference to the globalisation high road Mbeki regu-
larly makes is to ‘telemedicine’ (i.e. interventions by specialists at a great
geographical distance). As he put it in a speech to a corporate San Francisco
audience, up the road from Silicon Valley, in May 2000:
Few amongst us will disagree when we assert that a global society presents
us with the opportunities to collapse both time and space, so that a village
health worker in Uganda could perform some of the most difficult medical
procedures with the assistance of a surgeon sitting in her office in San
Francisco. To be able to do this, it requires of the people in a poor country
such as Uganda to have access to education, to have access to satellite tech-
nology, and for the doctor and nurse in Uganda to be up to speed with the
latest telemedicine technology.17
Yet telemedicine also requires something else that Uganda has a very hard
time acquiring, given the fluctuating prices of its main agricultural exports
and its extreme burden of foreign-debt repayment: hard currency. This vital
barrier is obviously the main constraint behind the integration of Africa
into the New Economy, yet paradoxically it also offers neo-liberal policy
advocates a rationale – even an imperative – for intensifying further Africa’s
self-defeating, export-oriented development strategy.
Hunting for foreign exchange

The need to earn forex is always at the back of Mbeki’s mind, and the last
quarter of a century of declining prices of primary commodities weighs
just as heavily. As he explained to the ANC National General Council in
July 2000,
You are aware of the fact that a central objective of our economic policy is
and has been the expansion and modernisation of the manufacturing sector
of our economy and the shifting of our export mix in favour of manufactured
goods. Given our strong resource base, this must mean, among other things,
that we add value to the resources we produce, so that we supply highly
sophisticated intermediate products to the world industrial economy.18
But from this technological fix – the implications of which are to enter the
world economy through greater ‘beneficiation’ of raw materials – there
arises some profound dilemmas. Mbeki’s best case for a pragmatic engage-
ment with the world economy was close at hand when, at the meeting of the
ANC leadership in Port Elizabeth, he sang the praises of a newly
established factory to produce catalytic converters for cars:
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 124
To simplify this proposition, let me cite just one example of a new manufac-
turing facility that has been established in this city. I refer to a catalytic
converter plant which produces such converters which, as you know, are
used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles, to promote a
better environment. Again as you know, these converters use platinum, of
which we stand out as one of the world’s largest producers. The catalytic
converter plant to which I refer, which is here in Port Elizabeth, was estab-
lished by a foreign company and is therefore part of the foreign investment
we constantly seek to attract to our country. Its establishment has made an
important contribution to the struggle we continue to wage to transform
ours into a modern manufacturing economy, with a relative reduction of our
dependence on the export of raw materials. To be economically viable, this
plant has to export a large part of its output. It must therefore respond to
the world market in a way that ensures that it is able to compete against
other plants, wherever they are located in the world, with regard to such
factors as consistency in quality, delivery on time and cost. Among other
things, the management must therefore ensure that the staff at the plant has
the necessary skills to produce the converters and meet these requirements.
To put the matter plainly, in the event that the plant experiences repeated
work stoppages so that it is unable to address these requirements, the motor
manufacturing will switch to other plants located outside our country.
Accordingly the PE plant would then have to close down, with the inevitable
job losses and our regression to the larger exports of raw platinum … The
story we have told is not a tale of fiction. It describes what we as a move-
ment, a government and a country are trying to do, and the demands
imposed on all of us by the modern, global economy.19
Costs and benefits of converters

Setting aside Mbeki’s obvious attempt to discipline labour, several equally
obvious critical questions are begged. Who profits from production of
catalytic converters, what rate of return is expected, and how much of the
surplus leaves South Africa forever, as opposed to remaining for reinvest-
ment? What transfer-pricing problems might arise? Is the production
process as labour-intensive as local conditions should dictate (as is the case
for the leather-seat component sector)? Why didn’t a South African capital-
ist, or even the state, not establish that investment? What backward-forward
linkages, aside from platinum inputs, does South Africa gain from the
investment? What other costs are there to South Africa, such as the gener-
ous (and expensive) Motor Industry Development Plan incentives (and
could these have been used elsewhere to greater socio-economic benefit)?
Why, indeed, are catalytic converters themselves not required in South
Africa’s own fleet of motor vehicles? The answer, we know, is the added
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 125
cost per vehicle, in a country where transport is already prohibitively

expensive for the majority of people. Yet is affordability truly an acceptable
constraint, in view of the hedonistic consumer-profile of the new-car
market? What additional amount would a catalytic converter add to the
price of a new Mercedes or BWM, the output of which for rich South
Africans has barely faltered over the past quarter of a century of national
economic stagnation? Moreover, why have there been no efforts to adjust
the pricing mechanism within the domestic auto market – using, for
instance, a consumption tax on local and imported luxury cars to pay not
only for environmentally friendly accessories and unleaded petrol, but for a
dramatic change in transport patterns – so that cleaner, more efficient, more
equitable and more appropriate motor vehicles are produced? (The public
transport recapitalisation of private taxis hardly qualifies as a substantial
state intervention, given the sector’s deadly contradictions.)
Likewise, another question begged in Mbeki’s praise for catalytic-
converter production concerns South Africa’s broader responsibility for
reducing its own per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide, which are nearly
as high as Japan’s. Indeed, the other major export-oriented, beneficiation
strategy that Mbeki could easily have mentioned in Port Elizabeth is that
city’s local Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) pilot project: the proposed
Coega stainless steel plant. Its initial formulation was as a zinc smelter, but
when that failed because of a global oversupply of zinc, the proposed huge
deep-water port and steel plant at Coega were justified as offsets for a
purchase of submarines through a German firm. However, Coega – like
Mozal in Maputo – is an electricity-guzzling, pollution-intensive, export-
oriented, heavily-subsidised project which, as Business Day newspaper
points out regularly, should not go forward without a clear demonstration
of economic sustainability. Such sustainability is questionable, as the deal
boils down to a face-saving device for the government’s claim that
R30 billion in arms purchases would generate R100 billion in matching
investments.20 Worse, the number of permanent jobs created is only around
1 000, with the cost per job roughly 1 000 times higher than traditional
public works or even employment in small, medium and micro enterprises.
In this case, funding the project from state coffers – covering a variety of
SDI incentives plus a large Portnet subsidy for a questionable new deep-
water port – will have the effect of diminishing Port Elizabeth’s own poten-
tial to subsidise electricity for low-income households, as cross-subsidies
from big firms to poor people are out of the question.21
A top official has already expressed great resistance to raising the price
of heavily-polluting, electricity-intensive, export-oriented projects: ‘If we
increase the price of electricity to users like Alusaf, their products will
become uncompetitive and that will affect our balance of payments … It’s
a fact that international capital holds sway as we come to the end of the
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 126
20th century.’22 Mbeki could not be unaware of the massive socio-ecological

injustice associated with South Africa’s ultra-cheap energy prices for corpo-
rations like Alusaf, Columbus, Highveld and Iscor (which together
consume more than a quarter of South African coal-generated electricity).
He firmly endorsed the ‘Berlin Communiqué’ in June 2000, with its
concern over global warming: ‘The global environment must be handed on
safely to future generations. Sustainable development is an important orien-
tation for modern governance.’ Yet in the next sentence is, once again,
a resort to Washington Consensus-think: ‘We support the commitments
in the Kyoto Protocol and want to use new mechanisms, like emis-
sions trading, to create common interest between the developing and devel-
oped world.’23 Even setting aside the US government’s attempt in
November 2000 to sabotage the Kyoto agreement at a follow-up session in
The Hague, the ‘commodification of everything’ proceeds apace, extending
even to air.
Water wars
Similarly, South African water has also been subject to globalisation’s
techno-economic fix, in at least two ways. British and French water priva-
tisers have been welcomed with open arms, notwithstanding convincing
documentation of consumer exploitation, worker disempowerment and
political corruption. And the World Bank has entered the debate over the
pricing of water, strongly inveighing against the free ‘lifeline’ supply
mandated in the RDP.24
Why shouldn’t water, electricity and telephones be provided by inter-
national firms? According to finance minister Trevor Manuel, after all,
‘foreign investment in state-owned enterprises allows for access to cutting-
edge technologies and increases the effectiveness with which these entities
can deliver on the rollout of essential services’.25
Yet on closer examination, the two most important pilots associated with
‘public-private partnerships’ in basic services had already proved Manuel
wrong by the end of the 1990s. The role of Suez Lyonnais des Eaux in
several Eastern Cape towns after five years left the black townships
increasingly subject not just to water cut-offs for non-payment of bills, but
even to curtailment of the ‘bucket system’ of excrement collection as well
(contrary to the firm’s promise in 1994 that it would urgently upgrade the
sanitation system from the prevailing 19th-century standards).26 The en-
during use of the bucket system gives the lie to Manuel’s belief that foreign
investment brings effective delivery of essential services.
Telephone tag
Likewise, the most important partial privatisation to date, of Telkom,
generated two scandalous dynamics that reflect the charlatan character of
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 127
such partnerships. Firstly, the Texan and Malaysian partners who in 1997
bought 30% of Telkom have not only retrenched tens of thousands of
workers (for which the state must carry the burden of associated social
costs), but have attacked the cross-subsidisation of telephone calls.
Previously, a local call received a large subsidy, paid for by long-distance
users. That cross-subsidy evaporated because it detracted from the US-
Malaysian consortium’s profitability (as do all such cross-subsidies).
Secondly, the rollout of telephone lines is thus hampered not only by un-
affordability, but by the phenomenon known as ‘churning’, i.e. in order to
prove to government it has connected sufficient lines to warrant continua-
tion of its monopoly status, Telkom simply reuses old connections, raises
its prices for local calls, cuts off customers when they can’t pay, and recon-
nects them (usually under another name), only to disconnect them all over
again. The lack of sustainability in telephone rollout, as in the cases of
water and electricity, is hence amplified by the role of the for-profit private
sector.27
It is only fair to ask whether instead of attracting elusive foreign invest-
ment, more attention should not have been given to forcing local capital into
a developmental mode (through mechanisms like prescribed asset require-
ments for institutional investors and community-reinvestment legislation
against banks). Mbeki and his team spurned such RDP mandates, in favour
of directing enormous efforts to petition foreign privatisers, whose demands
for 30–35% US-dollar-denominated rates of return on investments did not,
apparently, faze Pretoria.28 And instead of promoting developmental invest-
ment by local firms, Mbeki gave them the opposite signal, leading even
Business Day editorialists to comment ‘with alarm and despondency’ upon
the ‘flight of corporate SA abroad’. In the case of the second-largest conver-
sion of a publicly listed company (De Beers) into private hands
(Oppenheimer) in international history, which in turn denuded the
Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the conservative editorialists blamed
‘the speed with which the finance minister has approved the Anglo-
De Beers deal (what odds on De Beers relisting in some form in London in
the next two years?) and the ease with which Billiton, Old Mutual,
Dimension Data and Anglo itself have slipped their local chains …’29
4. Ideology and self-interest

By mid-2000, after having done all in his power to attract foreign direct
investment, to little effect, Mbeki finally appeared ready to concede the
futility of his efforts (in this case to US corporate representatives at the San
Francisco gathering):
Notwithstanding some specific problems in some developing countries and
especially African countries, there are many among these countries that have
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 128
and continue to have stability and are at peace with themselves, countries
that have responded positively, even under very difficult circumstances, to
the prescriptions of both the prospective investors as well as the multi-lateral
institutions. Many of these countries have created the necessary climate
conducive to investment, for example by liberalising their trade, privatising
state-owned enterprises, reforming their tax system and generally adhering
to the prescribed injunctions, all done in an attempt to attract the necessary
investments. The response from the developed countries, to these attempts
by especially many African countries to stay within the confines of the rules,
has been to treat the African continent as one country, and therefore, to
punish a country on the one end of the continent for the deeds of another
on the other end. In our own country, we have been assured that our
economic fundamentals are correct and sound. We have developed a stable
and effective financial and fiscal system. We have reduced tariffs to levels
that are comparable to the advanced industrial countries. We have reformed
agriculture to make it the least subsidised of all the major agricultural trading
nations. We have restructured our public sector through privatisation,
strategic partners and regulation. We have an equitable and sophisticated
system of labour relations that is continually adjusting to new developments.
We play an active role in all multilateral agencies in the world. Yet, the flow
of investment into South Africa has not met our expectations while the levels
of poverty and unemployment remain high.30
Likewise at Georgetown, Mbeki spoke of ‘the many heroic efforts the
governments and peoples of Africa have made and are making to correct
past wrongs, encompassing … the sustained effort in many countries to
introduce new economic and social policies consistent with many elements
of the so-called Washington Consensus’.31
Resisting change
Recognising the futility of adopting the Washington Consensus in expecta-
tion of economic rewards logically leads to two options: rethinking the
strategy (including the assessment of friends and enemies), or sinking into
a deepening malaise. Mbeki is certainly capable of a vigorous defence of
national self-interest. But as witnessed by his failure to take advantage of
successful activist pressure against transnational pharmaceutical corpora-
tions in the pricing of anti-retroviral drugs (see Chapter 9), economic
policy-makers continued the failed neo-liberal strategy.
This reflects how Mbeki’s analysis, strategy and tactics leave much to be
desired. What about alliances? Unfortunately, instead of uniting with those
who could fight international corporate power, Mbeki sought pity and a
contentless ‘solidarity’ from global elites. At even a gathering so portentous
as the G-77 ‘South Summit’ in Havana, Cuba in April 2000, Mbeki invoked
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 129
the words of none other than Michel Camdessus, the ex-managing director
of the IMF:
The global solidarity required does not simply mean offering something
superfluous; it means dealing with vested interests, certain lifestyles and
models of consumption, and the entrenched power structures in countries. I
am certain that none of us present at this Summit would gainsay the impor-
tance of the observation Mr Camdessus made, that there needs to evolve a
global solidarity that is more than just an adjunct of national policies. The
relevance of this has just been demonstrated in our region of Southern
Africa. Various countries of the North came to Mozambique to help the
government and people of that sister country to cope with a very serious
flood disaster. A week after they had arrived to demonstrate this global soli-
darity, they refused to do the most obvious thing to express solidarity with
the suffering Mozambican people, namely to cancel Mozambique’s debt.
Presumably, such a humane decision would have been inconsistent with
their national policies, to use Mr Camdessus’s expression.32
Yet here we must immediately remark upon some substantial hypocrisy.
After apartheid ended, South Africa made loans to Mozambique to resettle
disgruntled Afrikaners and to refurbish electricity-generation lines that
apartheid-backed Renamo rebels had sabotaged. These loans have not been
forgiven by the Development Bank of Southern Africa and Eskom.
Changing the world would surely, for South Africa, begin within the
region, by forthrightly addressing various Southern African dilemmas.
Moreover, Mbeki and many of his closest colleagues were the beneficiar-
ies of support from allied regional nationalist governments during the
1960s–80s. That this translated mainly into public soothing of a desperate
Robert Mugabe, and not concern for the welfare of ordinary people, is
clear from evidence of South African sub-imperialism reviewed in
Chapter two.
Other friends?
Even if it were in better economic shape, the Southern African region would
remain fragmented and war-torn. And even if Southern Africa one day
provides a platform for a renewal of strident Third World nationalism –
witness Mbeki’s ally Robert Mugabe, who with his currency peg in
1999–2000 sought a Malaysian-style exit option from volatile international
currency speculation – South Africa will still have to stitch together much
stronger alliances. As the 1998 Tripartite Alliance discussion document cited
earlier asked so pointedly, ‘Can we forge a Brasilia-Pretoria-Delhi-Beijing
Consensus in the absence of any Washington Consensus?’33 There is a faint
possibility, at the time of writing, of a G-5 bloc of semi-peripheral states:
Brazil, Nigeria, Egypt, India and South Africa, plus potentially Mexico and
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 130
South Korea in future. But as always, the barriers not only of language and
culture, but also of divergent material interests and ideology intervene.
There are, as well, at least a few G-8 ruling parties who Mbeki can
consider as formal allies, especially the British Labour Party and German
Social Democrats. As he told the ANC meeting, ‘less than a year ago, we
were admitted as members of the Socialist International. This is the biggest
of all the international political associations and contains the most pro-
gressive political parties from all countries.’34 In reality, those ‘most
progressive … parties’ within Europe turned out – at Okinawa, in the EU
trade negotiations, in international sports negotiations, and in so many
other settings – to sport a deadly punch. As a result, Mbeki turned in 2000
to the rulers of Sweden and Chile as potential real (not Third Way) social-
democratic comrades, but whether this generates a sustainable ideology for
the 21st century or is simply another gambit to faintly challenge the global
power centres remains to be seen.
Aside from other governments, international businesses are also imag-
ined and sometimes actual allies of Mbeki (as I note at the outset of the next
chapter). While as late as December 1999, Erwin entertained Cosatu’s
proposal that trade agreements and the WTO specifically be modified with
so-called ‘Social Clauses’ that invoke labour, social and environmental
protections, Mbeki had apparently jettisoned any reform along these lines
by the time of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting
(CHOGM) a few weeks earlier:
We are pleased that the Commonwealth Business Council has made its own
submission to CHOGM on this critical matter. Indeed we agree with your
view that affirms the role of the WTO as an organisation that should be
solely concerned with fair and efficient conduct and regulation of inter-
national trade. Accordingly, we also agree that it should not become an
instrument for bringing extra-territorial policy changes outside the realm of
the WTO or, more important, an institution for introducing new and
discriminatory barriers to trade.35
For Erwin and Cosatu, the attempt to reform international trade through
Social Clauses was, arguably, also misguided. Partly, it relied upon a corpo-
ratist arrangement: the National Economic Development and Labour
Council in Johannesburg allowed big government, big business and big
labour to fashion a joint negotiating position. But, more generally, Social
Clauses violate fundamental principles of labour internationalism, namely
the need to avoid promoting the material interests of an oppressor nation
over those of an oppressed nation, above all when the wishes of the people
most affected have not been consulted.
To be sure, it is certainly appropriate to support boycotts against
apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Burma – for whom sanctions
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 131
called for by popular, democratic movements translate into a strategic

attack on local oppressors – but impossible to justify ‘humanitarian’ inter-
ventions in the sphere of trade through Social Clauses enforced by the
WTO, where economic interests are imperialist or at best narrowly protec-
tionist, and where status-quo power relations are exacerbated.36 Erwin
eventually gave up on advocating Social Clauses, because in Seattle he
found he was the only proponent amongst developing countries: inter-
nationalist solidarity on the basis of joint interests between Cosatu and the
Mbeki government was clearly off to a bad start.
And that is indeed a fitting conclusion to this exploration of ideological
debate surrounding the opportunities of globalisation and the threats of
global apartheid. Less important than a vision of rehashed social democracy
that veers slightly left of New Labour’s Third Way is an understanding of
material interests. South Africa is no different than any other country in
that regard. Yet as we will see in the next chapter, Mbeki’s initial prestige as
Mandela’s successor permitted him the luxury of making a fundamental
(mis)impression, namely that with the requisite political will, he and his
senior economics team could make a dent in international economic
institutions. In this way, trying to change the world became itself an ideo-
logical ploy.
Notes
1 Fanon, F. (ed.) (1967), The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth, Penguin, p. 186.
2 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Vox Populi – Is it Real?’ speech at the International Union of
Socialist Youth Festival, Stockholm, 28 July. This and all the following citations here
and in Chapter 7 attributed to Mbeki were published on the presidental website at
http://www.gov.za/
3 Zuege, A. (1999), ‘The Chimera of the Third Way’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds),
Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias: Socialist Register 2000, London, Merlin and
New York, Monthly Review Press, p. 106.
4 Mbeki, op. cit.
5 Cited in Bond, P. (1998), ‘Global Financial Crisis: Why we should Care, What we
should Do’, Indicator SA, 15(3).
6 Mbeki, T. (1999), ‘Statement at the XII Summit Meeting of Heads of State and
Governments of the Non-Aligned Movement’, Durban, 3 September.
7 ANC, ‘The State, Property Relations and Social Transformation’, ANC discussion
document (mimeo) reprinted in the African Communist, fourth quarter 1998,
pp. 13–14.
8 ANC Alliance (1998), ‘The Global Economic Crisis and its Implications for South
Africa’, ANC Alliance discussion document, October, Johannesburg, reprinted in
The African Communist, 4th quarter.
9 Bond, P. (1999), ‘Global Economic Crisis: A View from South Africa’, Journal of
World Systems Research, 5(2).
10 Erwin, A. (1999), ‘Address to Parliament on the Challenges of Globalization at the
“Millennium” Debate Occasion’, Cape Town, 19 November.
11 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Lecture at Georgetown University’, Washington, DC, 23 May.
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 132
12 In early 1998, during Clinton’s visit to Cape Town, Nelson Mandela, SA president
at the time, expressed enormous dissatisfaction with the same legislation. A period
of severe US arm-twisting of African ambassadors to the US followed, and official
SA scepticism was reversed.
13 Mbeki, ‘Lecture at Georgetown University’.
14 Erwin, op. cit.
15 Cited in McSmith, A. (2000), ‘Mandela Pleads for the Funds to Fight Aids, Pokes
Fun at Demonstrators Protesting the Effects of Globalization’, Daily Telegraph,
29 September.
16 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Speech at the launch of the Presidential Strategic Leadership
Development Programme’, Pretoria, 23 July.
17 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Address to the Commonwealth Club, World Affairs Council and
US/SA Business Council Conference’, San Francisco, 24 May.
18 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Keynote address to the ANC National General Council’,
Port Elizabeth, 12 July.
19 Ibid.
20 See, for example, Business Day, 4 May 2000. The actual cost of the arms escalated
to R43 billion in mid-2000, with some independent estimates at R60 billion.
21 Hosking, S. and Bond, P. (2000), ‘Infrastructure for Spatial Development Initiatives
or for Basic Needs? Port Elizabeth’s Prioritisation of the Coega Port/IDZ over
Municipal Services’, in M. Khosa (ed.), Empowerment through Service Delivery,
Pretoria, Human Sciences Research Council.
22 Dr Chippy Olver, quoted in the Mail and Guardian, 22 November 1996.
23 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Berlin Communiqué: Progressive Governance of the 21st
Century’, Berlin, 23 May.
24 Details are provided in Bond, P., Dor, G. and Ruiters, G. (2000), ‘Transformation in
Infrastructure Policy from Apartheid to Democracy: Mandates for Change,
Continuities in Ideology, Frictions in Delivery’, in M. Khosa (ed.), Infrastructure
Mandates for Change, 1994–99, Pretoria, Human Sciences Research Council;
and Bond, P. and Ruiters, G. (2000), ‘Droughts and Floods: Water Shortages and
Surpluses in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, in Y. Muthien, M. Khosa and
B. Magubane (eds), Economic Transformation in South Africa: Democracy and
Governance Review, Pretoria, Human Sciences Research Council.
25 Manuel, T. (1999), ‘Address to the US-South Africa Business and Finance Forum’,
24 September.
26 See Ruiters, G. and Bond, P. (1999) ‘Contradictions in Municipal Transformation
from Apartheid to Democracy: The Battle over Local Water Privatization in South
Africa’, Working Papers in Local Governance and Democracy, 99(1).
27 This is common knowledge amidst industry professionals: interview, Ashraf Patel,
Wits P&DM LINK Centre.
28 See Bond, P. (2000), Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal, Trenton, Africa World Press,
Chapter 4, for more details.
30 Mbeki, ‘Address to the Commonwealth Club, World Affairs Council and US/SA
Business Council Conference’.
31 Mbeki, ‘Lecture at Georgetown University’.
32 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Address of the Chairperson of the Non-Aligned Movement at the
opening of the South Summit’, Havana, 12 April.
33 For the reference, see Chapter one, endnote 2.
34 Mbeki, ‘Keynote address to the ANC National General Council’.
Chapter 6 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 133
35 Mbeki, T. (1999), ‘Address at the Commonwealth Business Forum’, Johannesburg,

9 November.
36 See Bond, P. (2000), ‘Workers of the World, Transcend the Wedge!’, Z Magazine,
24 February, http://www.zmag.org; for more on the Social Clause debate, see
http://www.aidc.org.za.
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 134
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pretoria’s global governance strategy
1. Introduction
Can Thabo Mbeki change the world? It’s a fair question.
‘We will succeed in the struggle to end poverty and underdevelopment
in our country and continent’, Mbeki assured a captivated San Francisco
audience in May 2000, ‘provided we can count on the kind of support you
gave us as we fought together to end the system of apartheid.’1 Thus the
South African president invited leading representatives of US business,
who in reality had for decades been diehard supporters of apartheid, nearly
uniformly opposing ANC calls for comprehensive sanctions,2 to help
combat what Mbeki has already begun to term ‘global apartheid’ – a system
nearly as profitable for US capital as was South African racism. Either
Mbeki is lost, bewildered, capable of saying anything pleasing to any
audience to curry favour, like any politician – or something else is going on.
Mbeki would argue strenuously against the former interpretation, as
witnessed in August 2000 in his attack on the ‘Caliban native petit
bourgeoisie, with the native intelligentsia in its midst, that, in pursuit of
well-being that has no object beyond itself, commits itself to be the foot-
lickers of those that will secure the personal well-being of its members’.3 It
will become clear in excerpts from his speeches considered below that
Mbeki’s approach to the global ruling elite is not about personal self-
advancement, or even advancement of a goal so narrow as merely increas-
ing foreign investment in South Africa. Instead, let us take as a given that
Mbeki’s approach is to engage the global ruling elite so as to pave the way
for a continuation of the South African ‘revolution’.
For in the same speech as the one quoted above, Mbeki continued, ‘Our
own intelligentsia faces the challenge, perhaps to overcome the class limita-
tions which [Walter] Rodney speaks of, and ensure that it does not become
an obstacle to the further development of our own revolution.’ Taking this
position seriously, it is up to anyone engaging in analysis of global geo-
politics and economics to determine not whether Mbeki is seeking to
‘further develop’ the South African revolution through ever-more strategic
global insertions, but how he is managing such a challenge; what underlying
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 135
P RETORIA’ S GLOBAL GOVERNANCE STRATEGY 135
analysis informs the approach; what strategies and tactics are appropriate;
and whether alliances are properly considered – all of which are addressed
in the pages that follow.
Chapters one and two established the premise that economic ‘globalisa-
tion’ – by which is generally meant free flows of trade, finance and direct
investment, under conditions of overwhelming transnational corporate
power, underpinned by a system of embryonic world-state institutions
based mainly in Washington – simply doesn’t work for South Africa, or
Africa. For that reason, Mbeki and his closest colleagues – finance minister
Trevor Manuel, trade and industry minister Alec Erwin, ANC secretary-
general Kgalema Motlanthe and others – claim to be reforming the inter-
state and embryonic world-state system.
The reform strategy will fail, though, not because of lack of will, integrity
or positionality of those involved. After all, since 1994, extremely talented
South African officials have presided over the board of governors of the
IMF and World Bank, the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development, the Commonwealth, the Organisa-
tion of African Unity, the Southern African Development Community and
a host of other important international and continental bodies.
Instead, the failure is already emanating from the very project itself, and
its underlying philosophy, inappropriate practical strategies and ineffectual
tactics (see Section 2). Instead of leading the world, Mbeki and his Pretoria
colleagues run a different danger: treading a well-known, dusty path, a cul-
de-sac of predictable direction and duration that, notwithstanding mixed
rhetorical signals (see Section 3), for all effective purposes excludes or most
often rejects, alliances with increasingly radical local and international
social, labour and environmental movements who in reality are the main
agents of progressive global change (see Section 4). Thus the South African
post-apartheid official leadership will not achieve its own limited objectives,
much less the further-reaching transformation required under the current
extremely difficult global conditions. And in concluding that Thabo Mbeki
cannot change the world, a more radical strategy necessarily arises as an
alternative.
2. ‘Globalisation made me do it‘

According to economists Jonathan Michie and Vishnu Padayachee, ‘In the
South African context, globalization has become a synonym for inaction,
even paralysis, in domestic economic policy formulation and implementa-
tion.’4 Mbeki lectured the ANC’s National General Council in July 2000
that globalisation ‘impacts on the sovereignty of small states such as ours …
The globalization of the economy resulting among other things in rapid
movements of huge volumes of capital across the globe, objectively also has
the effect of limiting the possibility of states to take unilateral decisions.’5
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 136
Fin de siècle strife

For post-apartheid South Africa, the mood of liberation shifted quickly to
despair during two moments of powerful international financial discipline,
in early 1996 and mid-1998, when currency crashes and capital flight
provoked dramatic interest rate increases and, in the first instance, the high-
profile disposal of the Reconstruction and Development Programme.6 The
prime culprit in making South Africa so vulnerable was the government’s
decision in March 1995, under intense pressure from local and inter-
national financiers, to discard the ‘financial rand’ exchange control mecha-
nism. This decision had the effect of attracting enormous speculative
financial flows, which in turn fled rapidly as conditions changed and the
investor-herd turned.
The country’s allegedly ‘sound’ economic fundamentals were, of course,
deteriorating markedly during the late 1990s. Growing foreign imports
amplified local deindustrialisation and job losses, while trade with Africa
became extremely biased, contributing to geopolitical tensions and the
inflow of economic refugees from neighbouring lands (and the resulting
xenophobia by South African workers). There was, moreover, a net outflow
of international direct investment from South Africa during the first five
years of democracy, while the uneven dribs and drabs of incoming foreign
investment were largely of the merger/acquisition variety rather than new,
fixed-investment (greenfield) projects.
Simultaneously, economic advice poured in from international financial
centres, based upon persistent demands not only for macroeconomic poli-
cies conducive to South Africa’s increased global vulnerability, but also
for social policies and even political outcomes that weakened the state,
the working-class, the poor and the environment. From 1996 to 1998,
international financial turmoil offered Pretoria a learning curve to hell:
among other outcomes, sinking the country’s per-capita living standards
while intensifying the world’s worst inequality; sending real interest rates
to their highest-ever levels; crashing the Johannesburg Stock Exchange
more than ever before; generating unprecedented municipal bankrupt-
cies; forcing cuts in water and electricity to the poorest citizens; exacer-
bating apartheid geographical segregation; and reducing the ratio of
people formally employed to those desiring a job to levels unprecedented
in a century.
Meanwhile, because Washington’s grip on international economic power
remained relatively undisturbed during the late 1990s, notwithstanding the
arc of emerging market crises, other disappointments were still ahead.
‘Debt relief’ promised at the G-8 meeting in Cologne in 1999 turned out to
be, as Jubilee 2000 South Africa critics had predicted, a ‘cruel hoax’.7 The
guru of Post-Washington Consensus theory within the World Bank, chief
economist Joseph Stiglitz, was fired in late 1999, and was followed by an
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 137
angry Ravi Kanbur in June 2000 as the result of Summers’ censorious

interference in the drafting of a World Bank poverty report. A ‘free trade’
deal between Pretoria and the European Union was negotiated, and re-
negotiated again and again when southern European countries protested at
SA exporters’ use of the names ‘port’, ‘sherry’, ‘ouzo’ and ‘grappa’.8
Another ‘free trade’ deal, like Europe’s, catalysed and nurtured by lobby-
ists of large corporations, between Africa and the United States likewise
went through numerous palpitations, and eventually included ridiculous
riders such as the requirement that clothing exports from Africa to the US
would have to include vast amounts of US-sourced textiles.
Mbeki’s self-mandate
The world was becoming an increasingly brutal place when Thabo Mbeki
assumed the South African presidency in May 1999, as attested by rising
levels of mass popular protest. Thus by mid-2000, just before his first
anniversary in office, Mbeki emerged as an apparently far more aggressive
critic of the global status quo. He made a series of trips to international
political and economic centres, and debated global governance. His
colleagues, as well as other compatriots, played active roles in key multi-
lateral forums. Within Southern Africa, Mbeki burdened himself with
increasingly hands-on diplomatic functions (particularly in relation to
Zimbabwe and the DRC).
At first glance, this activity seemed to represent an impressive, forth-
rightly progressive attempt to rejig the global economy in the interests of
lower-income countries, to actualise the ‘African Renaissance’, and more
generally to imprint the world with South Africa’s successful political deal-
making model and ‘social democratic’ approach to development.
But at second glance, with a more careful interpretation of Mbeki’s
agenda, cynics could justifiably object to his minor tinkering, confused
and confusing rhetoric, reluctance to question received wisdom when
applied to domestic macroeconomic and industrial policy, failure to work
through the logic of the argument from broad generality to concrete
settings, and questionable alliances. While key speeches containing
insights into Mbeki’s strategy are invariably eloquent and well received,
they leave important intellectual questions hanging. This is obviously not
because of a deficient intellect (nor the failure of extremely talented
Government Communications and Information Services staff to stock the
presidential website with his best work). It is because the approach taken
is suffused with immense contradictions: on the one hand Mbeki argues
that, to paraphrase, ‘globalisation made me do it’;9 while on the other, he
occasionally resorts to advancing what are among the richest, most
profound critiques of international markets to be found in contemporary
South Africa.
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 138
3. Mbeki v. ‘the globalisation of apartheid’

South Africa exists within an extremely unfavourable balance of global
forces; to point this out had, by the turn of the 21st century, become pedes-
trian. For Mbeki, though, this glaring power imbalance provoked moments
of honest and impassioned confrontation, even in the presence of Bill
Clinton at the outset of his (Mbeki’s) vaunted US tour in May 2000: ‘Mr
President, during our discussion today we also observed that as the world
globalizes, we continue to be confronted by unacceptable levels of poverty
and deprivation, disease, war and conflict. Indeed the gulf between rich and
poor has been widening.’10
Unethical development
With a distinctly distressed moral tone, Mbeki forthrightly complains about
the unfairness of the international system. Amongst intellectuals gathering
at a gala African Renaissance event in late 1999, for example, Mbeki’s
brilliant, wide-ranging speech tackled:
the problem we are facing even as we stand here, of arriving at the point
when we can conclude the bilateral agreement between our country and the
European Union. Stripped of all pretence, what has raised the question
whether the agreement can be signed today or not, is the reality that many
among the developed countries of the North have lost all sense of the noble
idea of human solidarity. What seems to predominate is the question, in its
narrowest and most naked meaning – what is in it for me! What is in it for
me! – and all this with absolutely no apology and no sense of shame.11
‘What is in it for me!’ The scorn with which Mbeki dismisses not only trade
realpolitik but also the very foundation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand as
optimal allocator of resources is noteworthy. He invokes, periodically,
deeply ethical contentions, as in this speech as head of the Non-Aligned
Movement to the Group of 77’s South Summit in Havana in April 2000:
‘All of us present in this hall represent countries that can pride themselves
on the continued existence of a strong spirit of communal, human solidar-
ity among many of our people. The atomisation of the family and the
individual, driven by the development and entrenchment of the capitalist
system, has not reached the structural permanence it has attained in the
developed countries of the North.’12
And again, in July 2000, just after Germany had won the 2006 soccer
World Cup by one vote, he told his party’s National General Council: ‘As
the ANC, we therefore understand very well what is meant by what one
writer has described as the globalization of apartheid.’13
It is with such phraseology that Mbeki accomplishes a dual elision: on
the one hand a displacement of the South’s problems from the untouchable
economic to the moral-political terrain, which in turn evokes calls for the
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 139
reform – not dismantling – of existing economic systems and institutions;

but on the other, as noted above, a relentless campaign to persuade his
constituents that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to globalisation. For here, with
Mbeki addressing the ANC National General Council meeting in Port
Elizabeth in July 2000, we locate a striking difference in Mbeki’s rhetoric
regarding racial apartheid – which the ANC always insisted should be
‘abolished’ not reformed – and global apartheid:
Let me now mention that big, and some think, ugly word – globalization.
This is one of the contemporary phenomena we will have to ensure we
understand. We will have to understand this because whether we like it or
not, we are part of the world economy. It would neither be possible nor
desirable that we cut ourselves off from that world economy so that the
process of globalization becomes a matter irrelevant to our country and
people.14
For Mbeki, the most important practical difference between racial and
global apartheid seems to be the contemporary lack of a distinct ‘enemy’:
‘[T]here is nobody in the world that formed a secret committee to conspire
to impose globalization on an unsuspecting humanity. The process of
globalization is an objective outcome of the development of the productive
forces that create wealth, including their continuous improvement and
expansion through the impact on them of advances in science, technology
and engineering.’15
Thus even though, symptomatically perhaps, power relations are skewed,
the driving force of globalisation boils down, in Mbeki’s neutral story, to
little more than technological determinism. With this defeatist – and highly
questionable – attitude, and considering that South African state elites were
not managing their own developmental challenge particularly successfully,
the next logical question is whether those elites should be entrusted with
some of the world’s most important development-management positions.
Ending global apartheid

Mbeki and his team would answer in the affirmative, combining self-
confidence with a unique noblesse oblige. Alec Erwin, for instance, openly
expressed Pretoria’s grandest ambitions to his parliamentary colleagues,
ironically just prior to the Seattle round of the World Trade Organisation:
‘We will soon have to give leadership not just to the process of the develop-
ment of our own economies [in the developing world] but to the equitable
development of the world economy. The political capacity to do this and
the will to do it in the G7 is weakening despite the power of the social
democrats.’16
In the wake of defeating apartheid, the ANC in particular must drama-
tically expand its objectives, Mbeki told the Port Elizabeth gathering in
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 140
July 2000: ‘When we decided to address the critical question of the ANC
as an agent of change, the central subject of this National General
Council, we sought to examine ourselves as an agent of change to end the
apartheid legacy in our own country. We also sought to examine the ques-
tion of what contribution we could make to the struggle to end apartheid
globally.’17
The best answer – contradictory though it turns out to be – may come in
the field of pharmaceutical products, especially access to anti-retrovirals to
combat HIV/AIDS, as I will discuss below and in Part three. But the
answer Mbeki has instead provided, e.g. in Havana, combines at least five
basic challenges:
a) the alleviation of the debt burden carried by many … countries, includ-
ing its cancellation;
b) an effective mechanism to ensure a substantial increase in capital flows
into the developing economies as this is a prerequisite for development;
c) the reversal of the trend resulting in a sharp drop in official development
assistance;
d) the opening of the markets of the developed countries to our products,
including agricultural products; and
e) the transfer of technology.18
Debt debacle
I will consider these challenges one by one, while saving technology transfer
– in the case of drug patents – for Part three of the book. It is arguable that
Mbeki’s approach to the first challenge, debt relief, has done incalculable
damage, mainly by virtue of his failure to endorse the Jubilee 2000 South
Africa campaign against ‘odious debt’, including apartheid debt. Numerous
vitriolic debates between civil society and government have occurred on this
issue since 1996, and do not bear repeating in full here. Suffice to say,
Jubilee 2000 critics argue, that had Mbeki and his predecessor Nelson
Mandela been truly serious about the debt issue, they would not have:
a) agreed to repay the apartheid foreign debt to commercial banks when it
was last rescheduled in October 1993;
b) claimed, repeatedly, that there is no foreign debt owed by the South
African government (by ignoring roughly US$25 billion parastatal and
private sector debt, for which the South African state inherited repayment
and guarantor responsibilities);
c) negated the possibility of demanding reparations for previous foreign
credits to the apartheid regime; and
d) endorsed, repeatedly, the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative of the
G-8, IMF and World Bank, which proved such a distraction from the
cause of debt cancellation.19
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 141
Reversing financial flows

Regarding the second of the five challenges mentioned above, inflows of
capital, there are two kinds worth considering: financial and foreign direct
investment. It hardly needs arguing that ‘hot money’ speculative inflow to
emerging markets does not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as ‘a
prerequisite for development’. Nor do the vast majority of foreign loans
granted to Third World governments over the past 30 years. Nevertheless,
Manuel continues to argue – as in a speech in September 1999 to the US-
South Africa Business and Finance Forum – that international finance
should continue flowing freely to and from South Africa:
South Africa remains committed to the gradual liberalisation of the capital
account. These controls will continue to be reduced in a manner that does
not destabilise the market, while ensuring that the financial system manages
its risk exposure in a prudent manner … In South Africa we have estab-
lished certain principles: as financial flows are far larger than central bank
reserves the rationale for defending the currency is questionable … We are
convinced that our banking system survived the difficulties of last year
[1998] because the experience of currency movements in previous years
had shown the Banks the value of having in place highly effective risk
management systems and the need to be constantly conscious of the
dangers of currency exposure.20
Yet to advance this Washington-friendly discourse, Manuel had to ignore
all the evidence to the contrary: the exceptionally expensive effort by
Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals to prop up the rand in mid-1998; the
massive losses sustained by SA banks gambling in international financial
markets, also in 1998; and the failure of a substantial chunk of the small-
bank market, specifically because of ineffectual Reserve Bank supervision
and regulation.21
Even if attracting financial flows is a questionable objective, the second
type of potential capital inflow – plant, equipment and machinery – is typi-
cally understood as an essential ingredient in any Washington-approved
development strategy. But after having done all in his power to attract
foreign direct investment, Mbeki has not succeeded: South Africa has
suffered a net outflow of such investment since the end of apartheid. Steve
Morrison, the Africa expert at Washington’s premier imperial think-tank,
the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, confirmed that Mbeki
‘has toed the line in a disciplined fashion, yet he has had very little return
on that’.22
Is there, as Mbeki seeks, an ‘effective mechanism’ to reverse the problem
of scarce capital inflows? The standard mechanism to date has been the
‘seal of approval’ of the World Bank and IMF, yet huge controversies
surrounded the imposition in the late 1990s – and ongoing – of Washington
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 142
Consensus macroeconomic policy, dictated top-down, justified by

Washington’s need to rebuild the ‘confidence’ of international investors
(using enormous bailouts paid for through huge cuts in living standards to
do so). Would reforming the international financial institutions constitute a
viable strategy for changing investment patterns?23
The chairperson of the IMF and World Bank during 2000, Trevor
Manuel, describes his reform agenda mainly in terms of democratising the
Bretton Woods institutions, by which is meant expanding developing coun-
try inputs to the board, rather than director-voting according to the present
formula of ownership. As he explained in mid-1999,
The power relations in these institutions need to change. This is a ‘Catch 22’
situation. Their Articles of Association go back to 1944, when the first shares
were allocated. Voting is based on the amount of shares a country holds. The
biggest problem that confronts us in relation to the Bretton Woods
Institutions is that you need an 85% vote to effect any change. With the US
holding about 17% of all shares, no reform can take place without its agree-
ment. Therefore, the kinds of reforms we are hoping for are not going to
happen unless the world takes a very different approach to these institu-
tions.24
The ‘kinds of reforms we are hoping for’ in global financial markets have
never been publicly spelled out in convincing detail. Chapter 12 considers
some associated with financial taxation and capital controls, in favour of
which Manuel has occasionally lobbied in public and private. But even
when Manuel has talked of a globally co-ordinated ‘Tobin Tax’ against
speculative financial capital flows (as in an interview in mid-1999), it has
been conditioned by caution:
As a small economy with low savings, however, we are dependent on foreign
capital flows, and are likely to be punished if we took such a decision … We
are very mindful of the need to restructure the international financial system,
and would want to be part of the first wave of constructing some ‘speed
bumps’ to financial flows … But now, as there doesn’t appear to be a finan-
cial crisis anymore, too few of the appropriately placed people are asking
what has happened to this idea.25
In contrast, early in the 21st century, at least a few people were asking what
happened to Manuel when he became chairperson of the Bretton Woods
institutions. From South Africa’s standpoint, what would a reformed IMF
and World Bank look like? One answer might be surmised by considering
that, as Manuel put it, ‘Our relationship with the World Bank is generally
structured around the reservoir of knowledge in the Bank’,26 and that the
World Bank itself considers its South African operations as the key pilot in
its reinvention as a ‘Knowledge Bank’.27 Yet virtually without exception,
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 143
development knowledge shared with post-apartheid South Africa – e.g.

missions and policy support in fields such as water, land reform, housing,
public works, healthcare and macroeconomics, as shown in Chapter three
– was excessively neo-liberal in orientation, and failed to deliver the goods.
As a result, the ANC has had quite a schizophrenic relationship with the
Bretton Woods institutions, and in the wake of the protests in Washington
on 16 April 2000, this degenerated into defensiveness: ‘It is very fashionable
for people to say that the macroeconomic policy of the country was dictated
by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank’, complained ANC
secretary-general, Kgalema Motlanthe, in a Mail and Guardian newspaper
interview shortly after the protests against the two institutions.28 The verb
‘dictated’ insinuates unwillingness, and so may be a red herring. In reality,
Pretoria and Washington have constructed a revolving door, as witnessed
not only by Manuel’s job as chairperson of the Bretton Woods institutions
during 2000 (and persistent rumours he was going to take a permanent job
there), but that of other bureaucrats who move seamlessly between the
World Bank, the Department of Finance and the Johannesburg banks.
Residual suspicions of nefarious IMF and World Bank involvement in
South Africa are worth noting in part because of their history. A National
Reparations Conference opened by Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane in
May 2000 resolved to demand that the IMF and World Bank repay black
South Africans for apartheid loans. From 1951 to 1967, the World Bank
lent Pretoria more than $200 million, about half of which went to support
electricity generation in dirty coal-fired plants. Yet black townships and
rural areas were denied electricity because of apartheid. As late as 1966, the
World Bank granted $20 million in apartheid loans even after Albert
Luthuli and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for anti-apartheid finan-
cial sanctions, and the United Nations General Assembly explicitly
requested it to stop (it replied to the UN, refusing to do so).29
In 1986, the World Bank again busted sanctions by indirectly lending to
Pretoria through the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, using a special
London trust-fund account to accomplish this. The IMF continued its
apartheid lending into the early 1980s, including $2 billion in loans after the
Soweto uprising began hurting Pretoria’s credit rating. After the IMF was
prohibited from lending by the US Congress in 1983, it continued to give
the apartheid state economic advice, mainly to adopt neo-liberal policies
during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including privatisation, extremely
high interest rates, export-oriented strategies and the unpopular Value
Added Tax.
But, claimed Motlanthe, ‘We’re not accountable to the IMF or World
Bank, as we have not borrowed from them.’30 This is incorrect, for in
December 1993, an $850 million IMF loan was signed by the interim govern-
ment, known as the Transitional Executive Council (TEC), purportedly for
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 144
‘drought relief’ (18 months after the drought ended). That loan bound
Pretoria to cutting government deficit spending from 6.8% to 6% of GDP
in 1994, and reducing wages. The conditions were kept secret until a
Business Day leak in March 1994. That newspaper’s top financial journalist
concluded that ‘The Reconstruction and Development Programme and the
TEC statement of policies to the IMF are arguably the two most important
clues on future economic policy … The ANC, in signing the statement of
policies to the IMF, committed itself to promoting wage restraint.’31 The
progressive sections of the RDP were subsequently ditched in practice.32
Motlanthe was also not told, apparently, about a $46 million World Bank
loan to promote exports in 1997, nor of tens of millions of dollars invested in
South Africa by the World Bank’s private-sector subsidiary, the International
Finance Corporation.33
Aid fatigue
In relation to the third challenge mentioned above, regarding foreign aid,
Mbeki calls for ‘more and better managed aid so as to deal with the basic
needs that will have to precede any form of development in certain areas’.34
One problem is that Mbeki did very little in practice to dissuade Clinton
and other international leaders from subscribing to the classically neo-
liberal notion of ‘trade, not aid’ (the 1990s value of North-South aid in the
1990s fell by a third).35
But what lessons does South Africa itself have to offer? Were foreign
donors encouraged, under post-apartheid rule, to turn aid pledges into real
programmes; sustainably provide for basic needs; promote civil society; and
support good aid-management (e.g. monitoring and evaluation, and regular
collective consultations with government)? There is a strong case, made in
Chapter four, that the Mandela and Mbeki governments were disastrous
models in all these respects.
As one example, donor pledges of nearly $5 billion were made to Pretoria
between 1994 and 1999. But just as government failed to disburse much of
its own domestic-sourced development funding (80% annual RDP-related
budget ‘rollovers’ were typical in the early years, but even during the late
1990s, inability to spend poverty relief funding became a national scandal),
the record of South Africa’s largest donor, the European Union, was also
appalling. So, in making the case for more aid internationally, Mbeki has not
yet provided a convincing case that such aid won’t exacerbate well-known
problems of bureaucratic capture and non-sustainability.
Trade rules
The fourth challenge deals with the opening of the markets of developed
countries to Third World products. Mbeki wants to correct what he calls
the ‘rules and regulations that make the world trading system unbalanced
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 145
and biased against the very countries that need a fair trading system so that
these countries, which represent the majority of humanity, benefit from
international rules of trade’.36 Even if the South African economy is on the
margins of world trade, Pretoria has won a high profile in global circuits for
at least three institutional reasons: Alec Erwin’s 1996–2000 presidency of
the UN Conference on Trade and Development; his controversial role in
the WTO Summit in Seattle in 1999; and his subsequent attempt to bring
together a new ‘G-5’ middle-income bloc to restart WTO negotiations. The
latter two functions – particularly Erwin’s distaste for the Seattle social-
movement protesters and his near refusal to join the Africa bloc of trade
ministers protesting against abominable treatment by US trade negotiator
Charlene Barshefsky – must await treatment by other experts.37
Throughout, Erwin has argued for less Northern protectionism for
‘dinosaur industries’ like manufacturing and agriculture, but he has done so
meekly and ineffectually: ‘In addressing the challenge of trade and devel-
opment in UNCTAD IX, we were attempting to break with a conception of
contestation by stressing partnership.’38
‘Partnership’. Yet it is worth asking how partnership has benefitted South
Africa in the transfer of technology, e.g. in the case of patent surrender on
vitally needed AIDS drugs? How has it generated mutual interest in trade –
instead of the response ‘What is in it for me!’? How has it transformed aid?
How has it generated investment – with Mbeki bending over backwards to
Washington’s economic prescriptions? How has it accomplished even a
modicum of debt relief?
Progress on any of these issues depends on who one is in partnership
with, of course. At one point in his US trip, speaking to an African-
American congregation at the venerable Ebenezer Church in Atlanta,
Mbeki invoked the forces of social progress:
In a world where no country can insulate itself from other parts of the same
world, our success is highly dependent on your concrete support. This
global solidarity between ourselves was part of the vocabulary of the civil
rights movement, and some of us will remember that Dr King was one of the
first world leaders to call for a boycott of South Africa as part of the strug-
gle for democracy. This kind of solidarity amongst those who work for the
same objectives, has been the hallmark of our own movement and struggle
for democracy. We are therefore saying that we should continue with this
struggle of working together and striving for social and economic justice for
the poor, for countries of the South, and come with practical ways of assist-
ing Africa to pull herself out of the quagmire of poverty. I can assure you that
you will find many amongst Africans who are ready to work in honest part-
nership with yourselves.39
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 146
But with whom in the world does Mbeki really have an honest partner-
ship, and with whom is he building genuine solidarity? Notwithstanding
the eloquence of his Atlanta speech, the answers are not obvious.
Under Mbeki’s influence, post-apartheid foreign policy examples of
areas where solidarity was not extended to democrats include Western
Sahara’s Polisario Front, the Indonesian and East Timorese people suffer-
ing under Suharto (recipient of a Cape of Good Hope medal in 1997),
Nigerian opposition activists who in 1995 were denied a visa to meet in
Johannesburg, the Burmese people (given the junta-controlled ‘Myanmar’s’
unusual diplomatic relations with Pretoria), and victims of murderous
central African regimes which were recipients of SA arms. The National
Conventional Arms Control Committee reported that from 1996 to 1998,
undemocratic regimes in countries like Colombia, Algeria and Peru
purchased more than R300 million worth of arms from South Africa.40
4. Towards – or against – ‘global solidarity’?

Is there, instead, scope for an honest partnership with the world’s progres-
sive social movements?
Allies in health?
Sadly, the answer is negative, as demonstrated by the single most evocative
issue associated with globalisation and public policy in South Africa:
HIV/AIDS treatment. Early signs were encouraging, as I will note in the
next two chapters, for during a brief, extraordinary period, Mbeki and his
then-health minister (now foreign minister) Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma
forthrightly attacked the prerogatives of transnational corporate capital in
the pricing of pharmaceutical products, particularly anti-retroviral drugs
used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Tragically, this was an exception that
proved the rule, for the confrontation soon became Mbeki’s most embar-
rassing failure – not only to change the world, but to change the trajectory
of mass death facing his desperately ill domestic constituency.
There was a chance for an alliance. A vibrant Treatment Action
Campaign emerged in 1999, embarked on protests at US consulates in
Johannesburg and Cape Town, and began networking with the
Philadelphia, New York and Paris chapters of the advocacy group ACT
UP. US vice-president Al Gore – a lobbyist on behalf of pharmaceutical
firms – was confronted repeatedly and aggressively in Tennessee, New
Hampshire, California and Pennsylvania at the very outset of his campaign.
Numerous newspapers carried front-page stories on Gore’s quandary.
Within weeks, the vice-president’s own cost-benefit analysis began to
reveal the danger of siding with the pharmaceutical firms, whose millions
would not offset sustained damage to Gore’s image. In a meeting with
Mbeki in New York in September 1999, Gore conceded the validity of the
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 147
SA Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Act. With

Thailand also making noises about exorbitant drug prices and with tens of
thousands of protesters in the streets, President Clinton agreed at the
Seattle WTO summit not to push for stronger TRIPS (trade in intellectual
property rights) protection for US pharmaceutical companies.41 The South
African government then failed to take advantage of the space, as Mbeki
searched for excuses not to implement aggressive anti-AIDS strategies, such
as a controversial investigation into whether the HIV virus was indeed the
cause of AIDS, instead of pursuing the parallel importation or generic
options.
Whatever its final outcome, the joint struggle by the South African
government and the activists against Gore and the pharmaceutical corpo-
rations was extremely important from the standpoint of my argument. In
short, the David-versus-Goliath battle against pharmaceutical companies –
and the White House – was effectively won, yet Mbeki quickly snatched
defeat from the jaws of victory, and the broader war against AIDS took a
sudden turn for the worse. As a result, Mbeki desperately needed to
demonstrate that even though cheap drugs were available, his government
would not make them available to the masses.
Voluntarism and activism

To understand how far the government must go to downgrade alliances
with the Left, consider an ANC discussion document that appeared in
1996, which concluded with these lines:
The democratic movement must resist the illusion that a democratic South
Africa can be insulated from the processes that characterise world develop-
ment. It must resist the thinking that this gives South Africa a possibility to
elaborate solutions which are in discord with the rest of the world, but which
can be sustained by virtue of a voluntarist South African experiment of a
special type, a world of anti-Apartheid campaigners, who, out of loyalty to
us, would support and sustain such voluntarism.42
But the Medicines Act of 1997 is, activists insist, precisely such a ‘volun-
tarist … experiment’. It was, indeed, only sustained by virtue of an appeal
by local activists to ‘a world of anti-Apartheid campaigners’ who, ‘out of
loyalty’, militantly demonstrated in favour of the Act.
This is where, finally, the argument comes to a head. So far, we have taken
seriously the extent to which Mbeki says he wants to change the world, even
if the rhetoric has often confused listeners, the strategy is dubious and the
tactics have not been effective. Central to this problem is the question of
with whom Mbeki most comfortably allies himself. The social forces repre-
sented in the last example are emblematic of the challenge, for they evoke
enormous potential for real solidarity, and for changing the balance of forces.
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 148
Mbeki must realise who the genuine allies of the South African people
are, for he has invoked the Seattle phenomenon as a kind of threat, as a way
of telling audiences that there is a more revolutionary option if they do not
meet his demands. Speaking to Washington elites at Georgetown in May
2000, Mbeki quoted from Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘It may be that
the protesters who besieged the negotiators at Seattle were, in their way, our
own West Wind. What they said, if they spoke for the pestilence-stricken
multitudes, yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, was indeed that
since Winter was already upon these multitudes, Spring was not far
behind.’43
To a different audience of social-democratic activists, Mbeki was resolute
in his commitment to nurture challenges from the grassroots:
All of us, but most certainly those of us who come from Africa, are very
conscious of the importance that all tyrants attach to the demobilisation of
the masses of the people. At all times, these tyrants seek to incite, bribe or
intimidate the people into a state of quiescence and submissiveness. As the
movement all of us present here represent, surely our task must be to
encourage these masses, where they are oppressed, to rebellion, to assert the
vision fundamental to all progressive movements that – the people shall
govern!44
The problem is that this kind of support – Mbeki generously praising
demonstrators for raising consciousness – is not, in fact, mutual. For
consciousness-raising is only a small fraction of the concrete challenge that
many of the leading protest movement organisations have set for them-
selves, the essence of that challenge being to shut down the WTO, World
Bank and IMF (see Chapter ten). Mbeki’s approach is the precise opposite,
i.e. to gain greater admittance.
Serious reform
The radical strategy is multifaceted, but at the end of the day is not merely
destructive or protectionist, as Erwin and Manuel repeatedly posit. Recall
the first great reformer of the IMF and World Bank, i.e. John Maynard
Keynes, a key co-founder. When Keynes failed to persuade the dominant
US negotiators of the need for a more politically neutral institution at the
1944 Bretton Woods and 1946 Savannah conferences, he was despondent.
As one account has it, ‘Keynes had argued so bitterly at Savannah with US
Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson and was so distressed by the course on
which the Bank seemed to be set that his friends blamed the meeting for the
heart attack he suffered on the train back to Washington, and for a second,
a month later, which killed him at the age of 63.’45
It may be useful to conclude with the kind of changes to the world econ-
omy for which Keynes once firmly argued. For, if one only added ‘political
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 149
solidarity’ to the list of globalisation goods, the words that follow are
perfectly consonant with the radical strategy noted above: ‘I sympathise
with those who would minimise, rather than with those who would
maximise, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge,
science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature
be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and
conveniently possible and, above all, let finance be primarily national.’46
This, to be sure, is the kind of either/or formulation that may well be
objectionable to a both/and dialectitian of Mbeki’s accomplishment.
Keynes was perhaps not only a more active, successful and visionary shaper
of global circumstances than Mbeki – albeit from a stronger power base in
Britain, yet also ultimately a subservient and frustrating one – but in the
words quoted above he also captured the essence of a bumper-sticker
slogan that is often heard in the contemporary international social justice
movement: ‘The Globalisation of People, not of Capital!’ It is that slogan
which says so much more about strategy, tactics and alliances than can
Thabo Mbeki, and in turn hints more profoundly about why he probably
won’t – notwithstanding his ambitions, integrity and best efforts – change
the world.
Notes
1 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Address to the Commonwealth Club, World Affairs Council and
US/SA Business Council Conference’, San Francisco, 24 May.
2 Perhaps Desmond Tutu put it best: ‘I would be more impressed with those [US
companies] who made no bones about the reason they remain in South Africa and
said honestly: “We are concerned for our profits” instead of the baloney that the
businesses are there for our benefit. We don’t want you there’ (New York Times,
16 June 1986). For further reminders of the dissonance in Mbeki’s remark, see also
Innes, D. (1989), ‘Multinational Companies and Disinvestment’, in M. Orkin (ed.),
Sanctions Against Apartheid, Cape Town, David Philip.
3 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Ou Sont Ils, en ce Moment – Where are They Now?’, second
Oliver Tambo Lecture for the National Institute for Economic Policy,
Johannesburg, 11 August.
4 Michie, J. and Padayachee, V. (1997), ‘The South African Policy Debate Resumes’,
in J. Michie and V. Padayachee (eds), The Political Economy of South Africa’s
Transition, London, Dryden Press, p. 229.
5 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Keynote Address to the ANC National General Council’, Port
Elizabeth, 12 July.
6 The post-apartheid government’s uneven relationship to the RDP is documented in
Bond, P. and Khosa, M. (eds) (1999), An RDP Policy Audit, Pretoria, Human
Sciences Research Council Press.
7 Notwithstanding Mbeki’s plea in Japan in July 2000, there was nothing further on
offer to either the poorest countries or to those like Nigeria and South Africa that
were victims of odious debt repayments. See the Jubilee 2000 South Africa and
Jubilee South websites at http://www.aidc.org.
8 Though it was never pointed out publicly, the dispute mainly reflected the
Orwellian power of the ad. man to brainwash European consumers, for while no
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 150
one challenged the right of South African producers to fill their bottles with port
or sherry, they were prohibited from using what were formerly generic names on
the outsides of the bottles.
9 As already noted in the Preface, I borrow John Saul’s ironic phrase capturing at least
one common justification for non-delivery; Saul expands on this theme in his latest
book, Millenial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Trenton, Africa World
Press.
10 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Remarks at the State Banquet, White House’, Washington, DC,
22 May.
11 Mbeki, T. (1999), ‘Speech at the Launch of the African Renaissance Institute’,
Pretoria, 11 October.
12 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Address at the Opening of the South Summit’, Havana, 12 April.
13 Mbeki, ‘Keynote Address to the ANC National General Council’.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Erwin, A. (1999), ‘Address to Parliament on the Challenges of Globalization at the
“Millennium” Debate Occasion’, Cape Town, 19 November.
17 Mbeki, ‘Keynote Address to the ANC National General Council’.
18 Mbeki, ‘Address at the Opening of the South Summit’.
19 See Bond, P. (2000), Elite Transition, London, Pluto Press and Pietermaritzburg,
University of Natal Press, Chapters 5 and 6, and http://www.aidc.org.za.
20 Manuel, T. (1999), ‘Address to the US-South Africa Business and Finance Forum’,
24 September.
21 See Bond, P. (2000), ‘A Case for Capital Controls’, South African Journal of
Economics, 68(4).
22 Cited in Plotz, D. (2000), ‘How Others see the President: An American View’, in
Slate magazine, and reprinted in the Mail and Guardian, 21 July, p. 31.
23 A detailed description is in Bond, P. (2001), ‘The World Bank, International
Monetary Fund, Third World Debt and Foreign Finance: Southern African
Debates’, in J. Coetsee, J. Graaf, F. Hendricks and G. Wood (eds), Development for
the New Millennium, Cape Town, Oxford University Press.
24 Global Dialogue, 4(2), p. 15.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 This is confirmed in World Bank (1999), South Africa – Country Assistance Strategy,
Washington, DC.
28 Mail and Guardian, 5 May 2000.
29 Caufield, C. (1997), Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations,
London, Macmillan, p. 206.
30 Mail and Guardian, 5 May 2000.
31 Business Day, 30 May 1994.
32 Bond, Elite Transition, Chapter 3.
33 These include stakes in Dominos Pizza (which subsequently went bankrupt), in for-
profit healthcare, in housing securities to make the homes of high-income people
more affordable, and in infrastructure privatisation, none of which fight poverty
(and all of which add a US-dollar liability to South Africa’s stressed current
account). For details on the latter IFC strategy, see Bond, Cities of Gold, Townships
of Coal, Chapter 4.
35 Financial Times, 11 November 1998.
Chapter 7 7/22/03 6:43 pm Page 151
37 See, for example, Keet, D. (2000), ‘South Africa’s Role in the WTO’, Alternative
Information and Development Centre occasional paper, Cape Town.
38 Erwin, A. (2000), ‘Opening Address to the Tenth Session of UNCTAD’, Bangkok,
12 February.
39 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Address at the Ebenezer Baptist Church’, Atlanta, 26 May.
40 Batchelor, P. (1999), ‘South Africa: An Irresponsible Arms Trader?’, in Global
Dialogue, 4(2) p. 17.
41 The firms reacted with promises of cheaper, though not free, drugs, which in turn
were spurned by activists as too little, too late. When faced with the prospect of local
production, drug companies changed the subject by announcing offers of free medi-
cine, which subsequently did not materialise.
42 ANC (1996), ‘The State and Social Transformation’, discussion document reprinted
in African Communist, 4.
43 Mbeki, ‘Lecture at Georgetown University’, Washington, DC, 23 May.
44 Mbeki, ‘Vox Populi – Is it Real?’ speech at the International Union of Socialist
Youth Festival, Stockholm, 28 July.
45 Caufield, Masters of Illusion, p. 47.
46 Keynes, J. M. (1933), ‘National Self-Sufficiency’, Yale Review, 22(4), p. 769.
Part 3 7/22/03 6:44 pm Page 153
PA R T THREE
Economic power and the case of

HIV/AIDS treatment
ACT UP activists, Washington, September 2000.

Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 154
CHAPTER EIGHT
Pharmaceutical corporations and

US imperialism
1. Introduction
South Africa today records the world’s fastest-growing HIV infection
rates. At least 16% of the adult population, 20% of pregnant women and
45% of the armed forces test HIV-positive. In a context where many
patients have little access to treatment until full-blown AIDS develops, the
South African Department of Health has also tried to implement its trans-
formation programme, including allocation of scarce financial resources
away from First World curative facilities (which, among other things,
boasted the world’s first heart transplant) to new primary healthcare
(PHC) clinics.
Paying for expensive pharmaceutical products licensed to extremely
profitable international drug companies (one of which paid its chief execu-
tive officer a salary of $146 million in 1998) intensifies the problems South
Africa faces in meeting its public-health policy objectives. Indeed, transfor-
mation to a system based on PHC has been retarded, primarily, by fiscal
constraints, which have pitted the government against activist groups
anxious to see more resources spent especially on preventing HIV trans-
mission to young children. One means of relaxing the fiscal constraints is
gaining savings of 50–90% on generic pharmaceutical products, including
versions of anti-retrovirals to treat HIV. A law was passed by the South
African parliament in 1997 and signed by President Nelson Mandela to this
end, but was subsequently challenged in local courts as unconstitutional by
the pharmaceutical industry.
The difficulties faced by the post-1994 ministers of health, Dr Nkosazana
Dlamini-Zuma and Dr Manto Tshabala-Msimang, were and are tragic,
particularly in view of Dlamini-Zuma’s extremely active role in attacking
inherited policies and practices.1 Most other ministries fell far short of their
transformation mandates, largely because policies favoured corporate
interests or otherwise directly followed from neo-liberal, market-oriented
precepts recommended, in a surprising number of cases, by World Bank
advisors or their allies. In part because the inherited situation was so dire,
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 155
P HARMACEUTICAL CORPORATIONS AND US IMPERIALISM 155
in part because most wealthy white South Africans were covered by private-
sector medical-aid services while most black people weren’t, and in part
because of personal conviction and courage, Zuma was far more radical in
seeking social justice and redistribution than her colleagues. She challenged
extremely powerful health-sector interests: tobacco companies, urban
doctors, medical-aid companies and insurers. Her strongest campaign was
against international pharmaceutical pricing, which she argued was
discriminatory because it was based on extremely high levels of market
concentration and which therefore prevented South Africa from having
access to drugs at affordable prices, even those produced locally by
subsidiaries of the major international firms.
Particularly in relation to HIV/AIDS treatment, this represented an
area where Dlamini-Zuma could make amends with dissatisfied
constituents. The minister was regularly criticised by AIDS activists during
the ANC’s first term for squandering millions of dollars on a questionable
AIDS education drama, for mismanaging the alleged cure for AIDS known
as ‘virodene’ (ultimately regarded as toxic and unusable), and for imposing
mandatory notification for those determined to be HIV-positive, notwith-
standing contrary advice from virtually all quarters. In addition, the
closure of several major hospitals, the relatively slow pace at which clinics
were being built, and ineffectual AIDS consciousness-raising meant that
treatment and indeed education were severely hampered. Most impor-
tantly, however, in early 1999 Zuma claimed that budget shortfalls – in the
context of South Africa’s failed homegrown structural-adjustment
programme (which cut the state budget deficit/GDP ratio from 9% in
1994 to just over 3% in 1999) – prevented her from providing HIV-
positive pregnant women with zidovudine at several ante-natal pilot
projects. (Thousands of lives would have been saved by treating such
women with zidovudine, at a cost of about $13 million per year.) But, as I
will discuss in the next chapter, the deterrent was funding. AZT, invented
by the US government and made by Glaxo-Wellcome, costs $240 a month
in South Africa, but just $48 a month using a generic Indian-made version.
Glaxo-Wellcome offered to discount the price by 70% for the purposes of
the pilot trials, which, controversially, Dlamini-Zuma refused because of
the broader budgetary implications.
The high cost of AZT, zidovudine and other drugs was the basis for a
major pharmaceutical-policy initiative to augment the Department of
Health’s more progressive policies. Consistent with the constitutional right
to healthcare (within reasonable budgetary constraints), the Ministry of
Health had committed itself to providing many health services free to all
South African permanent residents. In 1994, free primary care was offered
nationally to pregnant women and children under six, and in 1996
expanded (in policy if not in practice) to include ‘all personal consultation
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 156
156 E CONOMIC POWER AND THE CASE OF HIV / AIDS TREATMENT
services, and all non-personal services provided by the publicly-funded

PHC system’.2 Implementation at provincial level was uneven, with many
provinces still limiting their free services to pregnant women and young
children in 1999. But, according to the Department of Health,
‘Independent evaluation of the implementation of the policy of free health
care suggested that it has achieved its aims as most clinics report increased
attendance; improved attendance at ante-natal and family planning clinics;
and nearly three quarters of the health workers surveyed … said that the
policy was successful in preventing serious illness or death among pregnant
women and children.’3 In addition, four months unpaid maternity leave was
legislated, and access to abortion became legal in 1996.
But with such increased healthcare entitlements, with increased coverage
and with increased clinic construction (at the rate of four per week, costing
roughly $50 million per year), access to pharmaceutical products became all
the more important. Based on a 1994 campaign promise, government estab-
lished an Essential Drugs List (EDL) in 1996, ‘consisting of medicines
critically required for use in the public sector for the prevention and
management of 90–95% of the common and important conditions in the
country … EDL medicines will be available at all district hospitals, public
providers and accredited private providers’.4 To assure the availability of
drugs on the EDL, Dlamini-Zuma won parliamentary passage of the
Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Act (‘Medicines
Act’) in 1997, which made provision for generic substitution by pharma-
cists of prescription medicine; scheduling of medicines; licensing of
dispensers; establishment of a pricing committee; and prohibition of phar-
maceutical bonuses and rebates for favoured bulk buyers. Its most contro-
versial clause – clause 15 – includes the following provision:
The registrar shall ensure that such an application in respect of medicine
which appears on the latest Essential Drugs List or medicine which does not
appear thereon but which, in the opinion of the Minister, is essential to
national health is subject to such procedures as may be prescribed in order
to expedite the registration … The minister may prescribe conditions for the
supply of more affordable medicines in certain circumstances so as to
protect the health of the public, and in particular may … prescribe the
conditions on which any medicine which is identical in composition, meets
the same quality of standard and is intended to have the same proprietary
name as that of another medicine already registered in the Republic … may
be imported.5
The most important points in clause 15(c) are, first, that South Africa could
seek the cheapest world price for a drug through ‘parallel importing’ (a
practice common in European Union pharmaceutical retailing and, as
noted below, proposed in a recent US congressional bill), and, secondly,
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 157
could impose ‘compulsory drugs licensing’, i.e. the granting of rights to

make copies of patented drugs without the approval of the patent holder
(permissible in health emergencies under international law), if it follows
safeguards and pays a royalty to the patent owner. According to James
Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology and an associate of
consumer advocate Ralph Nader, ‘For some drugs this reduces the price by
70 to 95%, depending upon manufacturing costs. Several of the drugs that
are candidates for compulsory licensing, including AZT, ddI and ddC, were
developed by the US National Institutes of Health.’6 (In subsequent
months, Love and his organisation became one of the central players in
defending the Medicines Act, and his invaluable documentation is liberally
utilised in the following pages.)
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)
typically accuses South Africa of theft: ‘There are ways to make drugs avail-
able to the poor in a country like South Africa. We need to look for
economic answers to economic questions … and not say the answer to this
economic question is we’ll just steal [patents].’7 (US firms are granted two-
decade patent protection and hence monopoly pricing power, except in
some circumstances in which ‘fair pricing’ is mandated, particularly where
there has been extensive government support for a drug’s research and
development. Lower pricing is fairly rare, however.)
After failing in mid-1997 to lobby Dlamini-Zuma to change the clause,
40 South African and international pharmaceutical firms tied up the law
(prior to promulgation) in South Africa’s High Court, claiming violation of
intellectual property rights on grounds that the Medicines Act would
specifically override the Patents Act of 1978. In 1998–9, international
pharmaceutical corporations – especially those based in the US – increased
the pressure through a campaign backed by the White House. The South
African Constitution guarantees property rights and other protection mech-
anisms from the Bill of Rights to ‘juristic persons’, i.e. corporations. These
rights formed the basis of the pharmacorps’ attack on the Medicines Act,
which, as noted in the next chapter, was abandoned by them as the result
of international pressure only in April 2001.
2. US government pressure points

As the leading neo-liberal health academic, Alain Enthoven, once famously
remarked, ‘The US political system is incapable of forcing changes in such
powerful constituencies as the insurance industry, the hospital industry,
organised medicine, the medical devices industry and the pharmaceutical
industry.’8 The converse appears more true: the major drug companies
actively lobby politicians to change US foreign and trade policy to serve
their narrow interests, notwithstanding potential damage to broader US
interests (and America’s image) and global health conditions. In South
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 158
Africa’s case, this required US officials to ignore existing WTO rules govern-
ing TRIPS, which permit parallel imports and compulsory licensing, as well
as identical provisions practised in various areas of US commerce, which
South Africa wanted to impose on life-saving pharmaceutical products.
As James Love summarised the South African position:
TRIPS requires 20-year patents on pharmaceutical, and South Africa has
20-year patents on pharmaceutical;
parallel importing and compulsory licensing are part of the patent system,
and both are legal under the WTO TRIPS agreement (for parallel imports
the TRIPS provision is Article 6, Exhaustion of Rights, and for compul-
sory licensing it is Article 31) … ;
the South African government is simply trying to use the patent system in
ways that the USA, Germany, England and other countries do, including
the use of compulsory licensing, which is a common practice in the US for
many areas … ; and
AZT and ddI, which are two of the prime candidates for compulsory
licensing in South Africa, are US government-funded inventions.9
These arguments were consistently ignored or rejected by US officials. The
US State Department and the US embassy in Pretoria, US commerce secre-
tary Richard Daley, US trade representative Charlene Barshefsky and her
assistant Rosa Whitaker, and Vice-President Al Gore together intensified
pressure in 1998–9 to force Dlamini-Zuma to drop the ‘offending passage’
from the Medicines Act.
Imperialism, in their own words

For a flavour of the US ‘full court press’ (see below), it is revealing to
consider an extensive citation from a State Department report in February
1999 by Barbara Larkin, assistant secretary for legislative affairs:
Since the passage of the offending amendments in December 1997, US
Government agencies have been engaged in a full court press with South
African officials from the Departments of Trade and Industry, Foreign
Affairs, and Health, to convince the South African Government to withdraw
or amend the offending provisions of the law, or at the very least, to ensure
that the law is implemented in a manner fully consistent with South Africa’s
TRIPS obligations.
During early 1998, Embassy officials and the Assistant US Trade
Representative for African Affairs made repeated requests to review the
implementing regulations for Article 15(c) in order to ensure that applica-
tion of the amendment would be consistent with South Africa’s TRIPS obli-
gations and commitments. However, the regulations for 15(c) have never
been shared with the US Government, nor have they ever been formally
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 159
published and implemented. South African officials said a pending legal

challenge of the amendments by pharmaceutical manufacturers precludes
them from providing the USG with documents that could prejudice the case.
An international effort. In early 1998, the Embassy in Pretoria
approached the Swiss and EU member embassies in South Africa to suggest
a joint effort to protest the provisions of Article 15(c) since European phar-
maceutical companies could be adversely affected by the amendments, and
some are party to the pending litigation. Although European Governments
preferred to let the US Government take the lead in demarching the South
African Government on pharmaceutical patent protection, French President
Chirac raised France’s concerns during his July 1998 state visit to South
Africa and the Swiss and German presidents also raised the issue privately
with Deputy President Mbeki.
The United States government makes its case. Assistant US Trade
Representative for Africa Rosa Whitaker traveled to South Africa in the
Spring of 1998 and raised US Government concerns with both the Minister
of Health and the Minister of Trade and Industry. She reiterated our request
to review the draft implementing regulations. Her personal intervention
reinforced the Embassy’s clear message to the South African Government
that the United States would not abide actions inconsistent with WTO obli-
gations.
The ad hoc working group on intellectual property created at the July
1997 BNC held its first meeting in March 1998. The two hour conference
call meeting did allow the US delegation – including representatives of the
Departments of State, Commerce, the US Patent and Trademark Office and
the Office of the US Trade Representative – to eliminate several lingering
misunderstandings and clarify once more US Government views. However,
since only officials of the South African Department of Trade and Industry
attended the conference call, the South African delegation was not in a
position to answer questions on the Medicines Act authoritatively nor were
they empowered to negotiate on matters related to the amendments to the
Act, since the Medicines Act is the bailiwick of the South African
Department of Health.
Special 301 Watch List. On April 30, 1998, with the full endorsement and
support of the Department of State, the United States Trade Representative
designated South Africa a Special 301 ‘Watch List’ country during USTR’s
annual worldwide review of intellectual property rights protection. This
designation was based largely on the potential impact of Article 15(c), not
only in the South African market but also due to its global precedent and the
undermining of WTO principles. The State Department joined with other
USG agencies with trade responsibility to insist on this designation in the
hope that this special attention would spur South Africa to change or with-
draw Article 15(c).
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 160
Withholding GSP. The Department of State, USTR, and the Department

of Commerce developed an Administration decision to withhold preferen-
tial tariff treatment from certain South African exports in the early summer
of 1998. On June 30, the White House announced that four items, for which
South Africa had requested preferential tariff treatment under the
Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) programme, would be held in
abeyance pending adequate progress on intellectual property rights protec-
tion in South Africa. This action was widely reported in the South African
press, but SAG reaction was muted.
Securing South African assurances. In March 1998, Secretary of
Commerce Daley met with South African Health Minister Zuma to under-
line USG resolve to ensure South Africa would not use the provisions in
15(c) to undermine pharmaceutical patent rights or allow parallel imports.
Dr. Ian Roberts, a senior official from the South African Department of
Health, visited Washington in May 1998 and met with US Government
patent experts and congressional staff, and attended a USTR-chaired US
Government interagency meeting attended by State Department officials. At
this meeting, US Government officials reiterated the US demand that South
Africa comply with its international obligations to ensure adequate and
effective protection to pharmaceutical patents. Dr. Roberts repeated South
African Health Minister Zuma’s pledge that it was not the SAG’s intention
to use Article 15(c) to abrogate patents or open the floodgates to parallel
imports.
Repeated efforts to resolve the issue. An Embassy official traveled to
Midrand, South Africa to speak at the June 1998 ‘Pharmecon SA 98’ phar-
maceutical industry conference. The official’s remarks reinforced in a public
forum the strong negative US views on Article 15(c) and made clear the
possible ramifications of the Article’s implementation, including trade sanc-
tions.
In July 1998, Assistant US Trade Representative for African Affairs Rosa
Whitaker met with the South African Charge d’Affaires in Washington to
stress once again the US Government’s concerns about pharmaceutical
patent protection and parallel importation in South Africa. She also repeated
the US Government’s position that South Africa’s requests for preferential
tariff treatment on four key exports would be held in abeyance pending
adequate progress on intellectual property rights protection.
During his September 1998 trip to South Africa, Commerce Secretary
Daley made pharmaceutical patent protection a key item in his discussions
with South African Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin. Daley re-
emphasized the US Government position on Article 15(c) and reminded
Minister Erwin of South Africa’s obligations under the TRIPS agreement.
The Vice President’s plan for a negotiated solution. During the August
1998 US-South Africa Binational Commission meetings in Washington, Vice
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 161
President Gore made the issue of intellectual property rights protection, and
pharmaceutical patents in particular, a central focus of his discussions with
Deputy President Mbeki. They agreed on a basis for a mutually satisfactory,
Government-to-Government negotiated solution to the impasse. Suspended
GSP benefits would be restored as progress was made in these negotiations.
This basis was developed and unanimously supported by all interested US
Government agencies. USTR was identified to lead the US Government’s
negotiation efforts. Initial discussion between the Assistant US Trade
Representative for Services, Investment and Intellectual Property and the
Deputy President’s legal advisor took place in September 1998 and follow-
on talks were conducted in November. During these discussions, the South
African officials attempted to persuade the US Government to intervene
with the US pharmaceutical industry to suspend or terminate its pending
legal challenge to the offending provisions of the South African Medicines
Act. The State Department, together with the Commerce Department and
USTR, decided that such an action might undermine the leverage that US
companies were exerting through their legal challenge. US officials told the
South Africans that since the US Government is not a party to the litigation,
the USG was unable to agree to this request. A subsequent round of face-to-
face negotiations between USTR officials and Deputy President Mbeki’s
advisors is tentatively scheduled to be held in Cape Town just prior to the
February 1999 Binational Commission meeting.
A ‘new’ medicines law. Meanwhile, during the fall of 1998, the South
African parliament drafted and considered a new medicines law that would
replace the existing Medicines Act, including the offending amendments.
The State Department’s Economic Minister Counselor in Pretoria met with
a key Mbeki advisor in September 1998 to advocate the removal of Article
15(c) provisions from the new proposed law. In October 1998, at the State
Department’s suggestion, the Embassy dispatched an economic officer to
Cape Town to monitor the committee and full chamber debates. He force-
fully advocated the US position and advised parliamentarians that the new
law should not include provisions that jeopardize patent rights. Despite
these strenuous efforts, a new medicines bill was passed including provisions
identical to Article 15(c), in November 1998. On December 4, 1998, the
Assistant US Trade Representative for Services, Investment, and Intellectual
Property sent a letter to Deputy President Mbeki’s legal advisor Mojanku
Gumbi noting the USG’s interest that the discussions lead to a mutually
agreeable settlement. As a way of spurring the discussions, he informed
Gumbi that the US would be prepared to release a significant portion of the
withheld GSP benefits should such a settlement be reached. Progress has
been slow, but we understand talks are continuing.
In November 1998, the State Department’s Economic Minister Counselor
in Pretoria met with South African Department of Foreign Affairs officials
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 162
to discuss resolution of the pharmaceutical patent controversy. The South

Africans were eager to find a satisfactory solution to the ongoing dispute
before the upcoming February 1999 Binational Commission meeting.
Embassy officials reiterated the US position and noted that USTR officials
talks with Mbeki advisors were the appropriate venue for seeking a
negotiated settlement.
Secretary Daley paid a return visit to South Africa in December 1998. In
his meetings with Deputy President Mbeki and Trade and Industry Minister
Erwin during that visit, pharmaceutical patent protection was the most
important bilateral issue under discussion. Deputy President Mbeki was
hopeful that recent discussions between the pharmaceutical manufacturers
and the South African Minister of Health would yield a solution. Secretary
Daley noted the possibility of negative consequences should progress on
resolving this most important issue stall.
The Embassy closely monitored the Zuma-pharmaceutical industry
discussions, which continued through December 1998. Pharmaceutical
industry officials have indicated that these talks have reached a sensitive
stage and that further US Government efforts at this time could be counter-
productive. The Embassy and Washington agencies have therefore deferred
to the US pharmaceutical industry to take the lead. In mid January, the
Assistant US Trade Representative for Services, Investment and Intellectual
Property sent a letter to Legal Advisor Gumbi suggesting that specific
discussion of pharmaceutical patents and Article 15(c) be put aside while
Health Minister Zuma negotiates with the interested pharmaceutical manu-
facturers. The pharmaceutical companies’ discussions with Minister Zuma
continue and their constitutional court challenge in South Africa remains
pending. USTR officials and Mbeki’s advisors plan to meet in February
1999.
Latest efforts. In January 1999, in the context of preparing for the
February 1999 US-South Africa Binational Commission, the State
Department’s Economic Minister Counselor in Pretoria raised the pharma-
ceutical patent protection issue with Deputy President Mbeki’s economic
advisor. Despite the Minister Counselor’s reiteration of the US position, as
well as a description of the ramifications of the suspension of aid to South
Africa in the USG’s FY 1999 appropriations law, Mbeki’s advisor said the
SAG was not considering repeal of the offending language in either the
Medicines Act or the new bill. As indicated in previous sections, several
adversely affected US pharmaceutical manufacturers have filed a constitu-
tional court challenge to the amendments to the Medicines Act in South
African courts. While the case remains pending, the South African
Government is adamant that government-to-government discussions not
prejudice the outcome. US Government attorneys share this view. Thus, our
efforts are, in part, circumscribed by the ongoing litigation as well as a desire
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 163
to be responsive to US industry’s request to allow its current efforts time and

opportunity to be effective. We hope the State Department’s and other agen-
cies’ efforts to convince the South African Government to fulfill its inter-
national obligations and commitments on intellectual property rights
together with a domestic legal challenge will provide sufficient incentive to
achieve the suspension or removal of Article 15(c).
Next steps. The State Department, its Embassy in Pretoria, the
Commerce Department and USTR will monitor closely the ongoing discus-
sions between the pharmaceutical industry and the South African Minister
of Health. We will continue our unflagging efforts to convince the South
African Government to either repeal Article 15(c) or make it consistent with
the TRIPS agreement, and thus eliminate the possibility of any abrogation of
US pharmaceutical patent rights in South Africa. Should there be an actual
violation of any US pharmaceutical patent right (e.g., patent abrogation) this
Administration will respond forcefully in accordance with appropriate trade
remedy legislation.10
The reason for such an unusually blunt official report is not only growing
US arrogance during the 1990s. In addition, the Omnibus Consolidated
and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999 provides
that none of the funds appropriated under this heading may be made avail-
able for assistance for the central Government of the Republic of South
Africa, until the Secretary of State reports in writing to the appropriate
committees of the Congress on the steps being taken by the United States
Government to work with the Government of the Republic of South Africa
to negotiate the repeal, suspension, or termination of section 15(c) of South
Africa’s Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Act No. 90 of
1997.11
This wording was proposed by Congressman Rodney P. Frelinghuysen
(Republican, New Jersey), whose district’s largest employer is the pharma-
ceutical industry. It followed his threat in July 1988 to cut off all US devel-
opment aid to the South African central government. According to Business
Day newspaper’s Washington correspondent, Frelinghuysen ‘believed that
the trade representative was doing a sound job, but that the state depart-
ment was waffling’ – hence his attempt to force the issue through the threat
to cut aid (see Chapter four, above).12
More restrictive than the WTO

The US government’s position was clarified shortly after Larkin’s report, at
a meeting in March 1999 in Geneva sponsored by Health Action
International, Médécins sans Frontières and the Consumer Project on
Technology.13 According to Lois Boland of the US Patent and Trademarks
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 164
Office, as quoted in Geneva, ‘We acknowledge that our position is more

restrictive than the TRIPS agreement but we see TRIPS as a minimum stan-
dard of protection.’14 As a concession, the US government modified the
phrasing of its objections to the Medicines Act, as shown below, to the
‘appearance’ of ‘potential’ abuse of ‘ill-defined authority’.
Clearly, something else was now bothering US officials, presumably the
international leadership South Africa was taking, in the wake of a similar
battle in 1998 with an economically crippled Thailand, in which successful
US pressure had led to the passage of a bill in Thailand that was more
restrictive than TRIPS. According to the report from the Geneva
Conference:
Trade pressure against Thailand was most recently stimulated by the govern-
ment’s attempt to begin producing the anti-HIV drug ddI. The government
was planning to offer people with AIDS at least one low-tech double therapy
combination (AZT/ddI) at an affordable price. Currently, ddI is exclusively
marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb at a monthly cost of $166. Since July
1997, the daily minimum wage in Thailand has been frozen at $4.50.
Thailand dropped its ddI plan when it was threatened with trade sanctions
on some of its key exports. This threat came at a time when the Thai econ-
omy was reeling from the widespread South East Asian financial crisis. Thai
physicians and patients were particularly outraged when they discovered
that ddI was invented by the US government and is licensed on an exclusive
basis to the US drug manufacturer Bristol-Myers Squibb. In addition, last
summer the US stimulated a Thai legislative bill, expected to be signed into
law soon, that severely restricts the use of compulsory licenses. Under the
urging of US trade officials, Thailand will implement a law that is much
more restrictive than the rules set out in the TRIPS agreement, the inter-
nationally accepted standard.15
As Professor Krisantha Weerasuriya of the University of Sri Lanka
concluded, ‘As a public health worker in the developing world, I feel like a
child being told by the developed world, do as we say and not as we do.’16
The US twists tighter

Double standards set by the US and its allies were noted by the Geneva
meeting, especially in the area of compulsory licensing:
Although, according to a statement released before the meeting, the US
government ‘does not generally support the compulsory license of patents …
and regards compulsory licensing as unnecessary’ it has liberally applied this
tool in its own domestic market in hundreds of cases. Licenses on patents
have been granted in diverse fields including biotechnology, pharmaceutical,
aerospace, military technology, air pollution, computers, and nuclear energy.
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 165
The US has traditionally used compulsory licenses to counteract anti-

competitive practices and a significant number have been granted royalty-
free. In addition, many have been authorized for non-commercial
government use.17
US pressure on South Africa intensified further in April, and for the first
time explicitly cited the South African advocacy role. In late April,
Barshefsky conducted an upgrade of the Special 301 Watchlist and formally
instituted a more serious ‘review’:
South Africa’s Medicines Act appears to grant the Health Minister ill-defined
authority to issue compulsory licenses, authorize parallel imports, and
potentially otherwise abrogate patent rights … During the past year, South
African representatives have led a faction of nations in the World Health
Organisation (WHO) in calling for a reduction in the level of protection
provided for pharmaceutical in TRIPS … We will continue to address these
issues with the South African Government and will conduct an out-of-cycle
review of South Africa’s progress towards addressing these concerns in
September 1999.18
Ralph Nader remarked: ‘Among other things, the US government is
officially punishing South Africa for permitting its public health officials to
speak out on trade and intellectual property issues in the World Health
Organisation … In fact, everything South Africa is seeking to do is legal
under the WTO/TRIPS agreement, so this and countless other statements
by US government officials are bald lies. But regardless, the exercise of free
speech in international forums is an astonishing basis for trade sanctions.’19
Vice-President Gore himself was now deeply involved in the arm-
twisting, according to Love (based on a discussion with a Gore aide on the
subject in April 1999):
I was told that on every occasion that Gore has met with Mbeki, the issue of
South Africa’s intellectual property rules for pharmaceuticals has been
raised, and that talking points on these issues are routinely prepared for the
Vice President on this issue. I was also told that USTR is the policy making
organisation on the issue of South Africa’s use of compulsory licensing of
HIV/AIDS drugs and other pharmaceutical IPR issues, and that within the
Department of State, Stuart E. Eizenstat, the Under Secretary of State for
Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs [subsequently promoted to
Deputy Treasury Secretary], has also been very active. Several persons have
told me that Congress has also been active on this issue, and that USTR plays
a role in determining if South Africa can obtain various aid programmes
from the USA, based upon a USTR opinion that South Africa is adequately
protecting intellectual property on pharmaceutical drugs. I expressed my
opinion that USTR is not competent to make judgements in this area where
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 166
there are important public health issues. Apparently Vice President Gore’s
office, the Department of State and USTR are also using talking points to
attack South Africa Health Minister Zuma on the grounds that she has
rejected a Glaxo/US government offer to provide temporary AZT donations
to some pregnant mothers, an offer that reportedly may contain other condi-
tions on South Africa. I asked if anyone in the US government with a public
health competence was involved in the decision to attack Dr. Zuma on this
issue, and if this was part of a public relations ploy to undermine her posi-
tions on the broader International Property Rights issues. Apparently US
trade officials are telling South Africa that any legislation that specifically
provides for compulsory licensing of patents on public health grounds are a
violation of the TRIPS, on the grounds that Article 27.1 of the TRIPS says
that patent rights should be enjoyed ‘without discrimination as to … the
field of technology,’ and that any special programme for compulsory licens-
ing on public health grounds is discriminatory. This is considered an absurd
interpretation of the TRIPS by most trade experts, including the staff of the
WTO, WIPO and the WHO, who point out the wide latitude of the TRIPS
to provide for compulsory licensing in Article 31 on virtually any public
interest grounds, subject of course to the Article 31 safeguards and require-
ments for remuneration. We intend to formally ask USTR for clarification on
this point, and to seek outside opinions on what we consider a bad faith
interpretation by the US (the same US that has several special statutory
programmes for compulsory licensing under the Bayh-Dole Act, the Clean
Air Act and for Nuclear energy). It goes without saying, but I was told that
PhRMA and individual companies have a well functioning system of work-
ing with Congress and the heads of Administration agencies to advance their
interests on this issue, and they have expressed concerns on several
occasions about the compulsory licensing issue with South Africa.20
The most charitable interpretation possible of Gore’s intervention was his
desire to maintain drug-company research and development funds.
According to a spokesperson, Gore and Mbeki were ‘committed to work-
ing together to chart a course that will meet the medical needs of those
infected with HIV or AIDS, without cutting off the commercial incentives
that fuel medical research in the first place’.21 Those commercial incentives
are worth considering in more detail, for their uses extend far beyond
research and development (R&D) costs, and into the corruption of the
democratic political process.
3. Drug companies pressure the US government

Prodding the US government to force a repeal of South Africa’s Medicines
Act is a very active pharmaceutical industry with seemingly unlimited finan-
cial and public-relations resources, generous campaign contributions and
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 167
revolving doors with the US bureaucracy. Drugs companies have substan-

tial motivation to kill the Medicines Act. According to the Chicago Tribune’s
Washington correspondent, ‘The law angered the US pharmaceutical
industry, which fears that widespread licensing of its products will lead to a
global “gray market” in low-priced drugs and undermine its profits and
incentive to spend on costly research. It pressed its allies in the US govern-
ment to swing into action against the South African law. They quickly
complied.’22
On behalf of the PhRMA, 40 members of Congress wrote to President
Clinton in 1997, warning him that the Medicines Act threatens the drug
industry and demanding tougher action. A great deal was at stake, as USA
TODAY pointed out: ‘That the most powerful country in the world would
spar with the most promising emerging democracy in Africa over access to
AIDS drugs illuminates the daunting variety of challenges that the HIV
pandemic presents worldwide. It also shows how fiercely drug companies
will fight to protect profits from anti-HIV drugs, a rich market with sales
totaling roughly $3 billion a year.’23
Debating the penalties

At the point the US withheld trade benefits to four South African exporters
in July 1998, Tom Bombelles of the PhRMA welcomed the penalty as ‘the
type of thing we are looking for them to do’.24 The organisation’s president,
Alan F. Holmer (formerly a USTR official), issued a press release in April
1999 applauding the USTR review of South Africa: ‘South Africa could
provide one of the first test cases for interpreting the scope of protection
provided by TRIPs to all fields of technology, and thus has broad signifi-
cance.’25 Holmer continued, ‘South Africa’s intellectual property regime is
deficient in many respects. It provides no protection for proprietary regis-
tration data. It allows for the parallel importation of pharmaceutical – i.e.,
for third parties to import drugs that are still under patent in South Africa.
And it allows the Government to require a company to license its patented
products to others in violation of the country’s international commitments.’
Another PhRMA official, Jeff Truit, argued in USA TODAY in May 1999
that South Africa is mounting ‘a brazen assault on patent protection, the
lifeblood of our industry’. According to the newspaper, ‘Truit says the
South African government’s stand threatens the development of medicines.
The average drug costs $300 million to $500 million to develop. One
company, which Truit declined to name, spent approximately $1 billion to
create a single anti-HIV drug, he says.’26
The US corporate position was echoed internationally. As the director-
general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers
Associations in Geneva, Harvey Bale (a US citizen and also a former USTR
official) explained in April 1999:
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 168
If anyone wants to kill incentives for further research into a targeted disease
area (e.g., AIDS) then one of the quickest ways to do this is to institute a
compulsory licensing regime for drugs that treat that disease. Compulsory
licensing benefits nobody except the fortunate commercial entity that is the
beneficiary of the largesse offered by such licenses. In the medium and long-
term, it is patients who will lack new treatments for serious diseases that
suffer, as researchers will undoubtedly stay away from targeted disease
groups subject to CL policies. Compulsory licensing seriously detracts from
the purpose of the patent system, which as the 16th President of the US,
Abraham Lincoln said, ‘provides the fuel for the fire of genius’.27
Dubious incentives
But whether anti-retroviral drugs are the product of hundreds of millions
of dollars worth of corporate R&D spending is hotly contested. To put the
claim into perspective, Love cites studies that demonstrate the huge share
of R&D covered by government:
In 1997 prices, the average out-of-pocket costs of clinical trials needed for
FDA approval were $25 million. Adjusted for risk, the ‘per approval’ cost of
clinical trials was $56 million … [Higher estimates] adjust these costs some-
what higher to include ‘capital costs’ for financing trials, but also and most
importantly the cost of preclinical research, which accounts for 70 to 80 per
cent of the total cost of drug development in some studies. Moreover, it is
often governments rather than the drug companies that pay for clinical and
preclinical research. For example, according to US tax returns, from 1983 to
1993 the pharmaceutical industry reported expenditure of only $213 million
on clinical trials for orphan drug development. This was about $2.3 million
for each of the FDA’s 93 orphan drug approvals during the period.28
A debate over the R&D cost incidence of AZT arose in the New York Times
nearly a decade earlier, in September 1989, following claims by a pharma-
ceutical company that it was responsible for the original research. Five
scientists from the National Institute of Health and Duke University
rebutted this claim:
The Sept. 16 letter from T. E. Haigler Jr., president of the Burroughs
Wellcome Company, was astonishing in both substance and tone. Mr.
Haigler asserts that azidothymidine, or AZT, was essentially discovered and
developed entirely by Burroughs Wellcome with no substantive role from
Government scientists and Government-supported research … Indeed, one
of the key obstacles to the development of AZT was that Burroughs
Wellcome did not work with live AIDS virus nor wish to receive samples
from AIDS patients. In a number of specific ways, Government scientists
made it possible to take a drug in the public domain with no medical use and
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 169
make it a practical reality as a new therapy for AIDS. It is unlikely that any
drug company could have found a better partner than the Government in
developing a new product. We believe that the development of this drug in
a record two years, start to finish, would have been impossible without the
substantive commitment of Government scientists and Government tech-
nology.29
Nevertheless, the pharmaceutical industry still uses a figure of hundreds of
millions of R&D dollars per drug, as did Truit of the PhRMA.30
Spin-doctoring pharmaceutical imperialism

Ironically, if not for R&D, then enormous investments are readily found
for matters of a public-relations nature when necessary. As media interest in
the South Africa scandal intensified in 1999, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS)
chairman and CEO Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. announced a gift of
$100 million to, among others, Harvard, Morehouse and Baylor
Universities, UNAIDS, and community treatment projects in South Africa,
Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland. Love offered this critique:
The Bristol-Myers Squibb announcement is a cynical public relations ploy
by a company that is fighting to maintain its monopolies on government
funded HIV drugs. The $100 million gift is about $3 or $4 for each infected
HIV patient in Africa, and it is less than the $146 million that BMS paid its
CEO last year. This press conference comes less than two weeks from the
beginning of the World Health Assembly meetings in Geneva where nations
will be debating proposals for compulsory licensing of essential medicines in
poor countries. President Clinton, Vice President Gore and US government
officials are pressuring South Africa, Thailand and many other countries, to
prevent the use of compulsory licensing to expand access to US government
funded HIV inventions like ddI, d4T – drugs currently sold at high prices
on an exclusive basis by BMS.31
Challenging global drugs-apartheid

By now, a matter far more important than merely changing a law in South
Africa – a country responsible, after all, for less than 1% of the global drug
market – had emerged: Mandela’s government was speaking on behalf of a
variety of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries on the pharmaceutical
pricing issue (SA took the three-year leadership of the NAM in September
1998). In the PhRMA’s submission to the US Trade Representative in
February 1999, great affront was registered about a meeting of the Geneva
World Health Assembly a month earlier:
[The SA government representative] stressed that it is the intention of the
South African Government and other Governments in the ‘Non-Aligned
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 170
Countries’ block to use every possible means and loophole in TRIPs to

escape their obligations to provide patent protection for pharmaceutical,
which reflects the Government’s position in the South African litigation of
refusing to answer affidavits on the question of whether any form of patent
protection will be considered appropriate for pharmaceutical; and she
emphasized her Government’s ‘unwavering’ commitment against effective
patent protection for pharmaceutical.32
Preparing to fight
Going into this battle, the pharmaceutical industry was well armed. The
Center for Responsive Politics recorded the flow of funds to politicians and
concluded: ‘Long one of the most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill, the
pharmaceutical industry spent nearly $12 million in soft money, Political
Action Committee, and individual donations during the 1997–8 elections –
a 53% increase over donations during the last mid-term elections.’33
As just one positional reflection of the industry’s power, the New York
Times board of directors includes three pharmaceutical leaders: Richard
Gelb, chairman emeritus of Bristol Myers Squibb; Raul Cesan, CEO of
Schering-Plough; and Henry Schacht, a director of Johnson and Johnson.
(Perhaps because insurance executives are also prominent on its board, the
Times repeatedly editorialised during the mid-1990s in support of the
alleged ‘new consensus for healthcare reform’, managed competition.)34
As a function of their networking within the US ruling class, pharma-
ceutical firms have become particularly close to Vice-President Gore. As
Love points out,
Gore is also closely linked to PhRMA and its lobbyists. Member companies
contributed significantly to Gore’s PAC. One of PhRMA’s key lobbyists is
Anthony Podesta, the brother of Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, a
friend and advisor of Gore. Anthony Podesta also worked for Gore’s David
Beier when Beier – now Gore’s chief Domestic Policy Advisor – was
Genetech’s lobbyist, and is the landlord of Simon Strategies, which shares
office space and projects with Podesta’s firm … According to lobbying
disclosure reports, Podesta.com … have 11 persons working on the PhRMA
account.35
4. Resistance
The pharmaceuticals industry requires excellent public relations – and
spends lavishly on advertising (more than on drug R&D, typically) – for the
ability to influence consumption. This is increasingly true in the Third
World, where a typical country imports between 15 000 and 20 000 prod-
ucts, costing half their health budgets. In part as a result of rapidly growing
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 171
Third World consumption, even in the context of structural adjustment

programmes which drastically reduced most residents’ living standards,
global pharmaceutical industry sales rose from $22 billion in 1980 to more
than $260 billion by the mid-1990s, with profitability the third highest of
any economic sector in the US.36
How the drug companies get away with this, while health conditions
deteriorate around the world, has been partially demonstrated in the pages
above. Unfortunately, though they distract attention from the more impor-
tant structural features associated with what Werner and Sanders term the
‘pharmaceuticalisation of health care’, the sleazy links between US phar-
maceutical companies and politicians remain essential to understanding the
US government’s outlandish argument that pressure on South African drug
law serves the broader public-health interest.
Critique emerges
Hence, many critics have taken up the issue by publicising Gore’s apparent
hypocrisy. Writing in American Prospect (an influential political journal in
the Clinton New Democrat tradition), an editor of the neo-liberal New
Republic, John Judis, condemns the pharmaceutical lobby’s White House
clout:
PhRMA, of course, is acting like a lobby – pressing the interests of its clients
even when their case is weak and morally repugnant – but what is astonish-
ing is that the Clinton administration has thrown its full weight behind their
complaint … The Clinton administration has regularly put the export and
investment concerns of American businesses above human rights and even
security considerations. But in most of these cases, it could claim that it was
acting in the national interest … Gore’s willingness to do PhRMA’s bidding
in this case may indicate that on the issues that impinge upon his high-tech
network of supporters, he is willing to do the wrong thing to keep them
happy – and keep them in his corner.37
In May 1999, journalists began ridiculing Gore in liberal periodicals,38
noting that a speech in Atlanta to prominent church-people that month
included the line, ‘Without values of conscience, our political life degener-
ates.’39 Prominent activists attacked Gore publicly:
According to Nader, ‘Gore is representing the profit-glutted pharmaceutical
industry, using the facilities of the US government, to browbeat the South
African Ministry of Health’ …
Standing next to Mbeki at a February news conference in Cape Town,
Gore, the favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000,
called AIDS ‘a crisis for South Africa’ and said the problem ‘must be faced
with a new level of urgency’. AIDS activists, however, criticized Gore for
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 172
publicly promising to fight AIDS while working behind the scenes against
South Africa’s medicines law. ‘It really is hypocritical for the administration
to pretend to be concerned about AIDS when they’re taking actions … that
are denying people access to very essential medicines,’ said Eric Sawyer,
executive director of the HIV/AIDS Human Rights Project …
Gore was more worried about competing for campaign dollars from drug
companies than in helping AIDS patients, Nader charged. Gore’s only
announced Democratic challenger, former Sen. Bill Bradley, hails from New
Jersey, home of more than a dozen drug makers, Nader noted. ‘He (Gore)
wants to go up to New Jersey and curry favor with the pharmaceutical indus-
try,’ Nader said.40
The battleground shifts to the US

But for Gore, such a strategy had its contradictions, for a related struggle
suddenly broke out in the US itself, where high drug prices also adversely
affected consumers.41 (For example, more than a third of senior citizens –
80% of whom use at least one prescription drug each day – lack prescrip-
tion coverage.) The only pharmacist in the US Congress, Marion Berry
(Democrat, Arkansas), regularly lambasted the industry and its government
allies for overpricing. Berry, Bernie Sanders (Independent, Vermont) and Jo
Ann Emerson (Republican, Montana) sponsored a bill in May 1999 to allow
pharmacists to re-import drugs from Canada, Mexico, Europe and other
countries at a cheaper price than that which pharmaceutical firms charge in
the US.42 The bill – HR 1885, the International Prescription Drug Parity
Act, to amend the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act – was soon endorsed by
several senators (Dorgan, Snowe, Johnson and Wellstone), who introduced
the bill as S 1191 in June. US citizens’ right to access to cheap drugs even
became a campaign issue in the subsequent year’s presidential campaign.
Wellstone (Democratic, Minnesota) was lobbied intensively by Minnesota
senior-citizen activists who regularly travelled to Canada to save hundreds
of dollars on their drug purchases.43 The Berry, Sanders and Emerson ‘Dear
Colleague’ letter explained the need for reform:
American consumers pay significantly higher prices for American-made
prescription drugs than consumers in other countries. For example, the
Government Accounting Office reported in 1991 that out of 121 prescrip-
tion drugs surveyed, 99 had higher prices in the United States than in
Canada (in 21 cases, the price differentials exceeded 100%). In a similar
study conducted in 1994 looking at the price differentials in prescription
drugs between the United States and the United Kingdom, GAO deter-
mined that 66 of the 77 drugs surveyed were priced higher in the United
States. In fact, four of the five most commonly dispensed drugs in the
United States cost anywhere from 58–278% more in the United States
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 173
than the United Kingdom, and 47 of the drugs evaluated had a mark-up of
over 100%!44
Moreover, early 1999 also witnessed an increase in resistance on the interna-
tional level. At the 52nd World Health Assembly in Geneva in January,
which had representation from 191 countries, a unanimous resolution was
passed on the WHO’s Revised Drug Strategy. According to Dlamini-Zuma’s
special advisor, Ian Roberts, ‘The main importance of this resolution is that
health now has a role in all international trade and finance agreements.’45
Strategies to pin down pharmaceutical companies and untie their drug
patents through clever wording in WTO/TRIPS and other international
settings appeared set to continue.46
The contemporary balance of forces is not optimal for winning or imple-
menting such agreements, as witnessed not only by the fact that the
Medicines Act was tied up in South African courts from 1998 through April
2001, but more generally by how thoroughly Third World interests have
been negated in most international trade and financial negotiating fora. In
a letter to Gore in May 1999, Nader noted that the Vice-President’s ‘aston-
ishing array of bullying tactics to prevent South Africa from implementing
policies … designed to expand access to HIV/AIDS drugs … [amount to]
an affront to the sovereignty of Third World nations’.47
Lessons from past struggle

This would not be the first such instance. In the early 1980s, a major chal-
lenge to the power of the pharmaceutical industry in Bangladesh – the
prohibition of many non-essential drug imports – was rolled back not only
by the US government’s threat of foreign aid cuts. Drug companies them-
selves refused to sell Bangladesh essential medicines. Only Sweden’s support
for import substitution and the formation of the Gonoshsthaya People’s
Pharmaceutical Company (a non-profit-making factory producing low-cost
generic substitutes) allowed some room to maneuver. The World Bank
subsequently ordered Bangladesh to make ‘detailed changes’ in the National
Drug Policy, consistent with the interests of pharmaceutical firms.48
Is it, therefore, realistic to expect sustained opposition from nation states
(even leaders as bold as Dlamini-Zuma) to pharmaceutical pricing? The
only way in which such resistance can be strengthened, Jacqueline Orr
noted in 1987, was to strengthen civil-society understanding and campaign-
ing: ‘Currently, consumer critics, international public interest organisations,
and grassroots activist offer the greatest hope for protection of people’s
health against the pharmaceutical industry’s aggressive pursuit of healthy
profits.’49 Thai NGOs, for example, took this analysis seriously in 1998
when they embarked on sustained protest in favor of pharmaceutical law
changes similar to South Africa’s.50
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 174
The US domestic political situation is also revealing. Notwithstanding

the apparent role of Congress as a nearly wholly owned subsidiary of corpo-
rate interests, there may occasionally emerge moments when progressives –
for example, Southern Hemisphere Jubilee 2000 debt lobbies, the Nader
groups and the ‘50 Years is Enough!’ network – can engage the wider
public through supporting oppositional legislation. As one reflection of the
possibility of uniting US and international (especially African) struggles for
lower pharmaceutical prices, Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (Democratic,
Illinois) sponsored a ‘HOPE for Africa Bill’ in 1999 which, among other
provisions (especially debt cancellation without classic IMF-World Bank
pro-corporate conditionality), would ‘prohibit the US from spending funds
to undermine African efforts to increase access to needed pharmaceuticals
through intellectual property or competition policies’. Without even an
outside chance of passage, the HOPE bill at least offered an alternative to
the Clinton administration’s neo-liberal US-Africa free-trade legislation
(and in the process divided the black caucus in the US Congress), thus
permitting progressive forces in civil society to mobilise without illusions.
For in all of this, conceptual clarity is critical. What was once considered
‘imperialism’ (i.e. US government actions on behalf of the desires of its
major corporations to trade, finance and invest at will) was rebaptised
‘globalisation’ and declared by old and new ruling elites to be good for
South Africa. The strategies and tactics of resisting the US-government and
corporate squeeze on South Africa considered in this chapter should, if this
analysis is correct, cohere in a sentiment against the very notion that essen-
tial drugs should be commodified by multinational corporations. That part
of the story we turn to next.
Notes
1 For background, see, for example, Bond, P., Pillay, Y. and Sanders, D., ‘The State of
Neoliberalism in South Africa: Developments in Economic, Social and Health
Policy’, International Journal of Health Services, 27(1); and Bond, P. and Pillay, Y.
(1995), ‘Health and Social Policies in the New South Africa’, International Journal
of Health Services, 25(4).
2 Republic of South Africa Department of Health (1996), Towards a National Health
System, Pretoria, p. 11.
3 Republic of South Africa Department of Health (1997), Annual Report, Pretoria,
p. 6.
4 Republic of South Africa Department of Health, Towards a National Health System,
p. 35.
5 Republic of South Africa (1997), Medicines and Related Substances Control
Amendment Act, Cape Town, pp. 6–7.
6 Love, J. (1999), ‘Info-Policy-Notes: US Law Requires US Department of State to
Seek Repeal of South African Law on Essential Medicines’, Consumer Project on
Technology, Washington, DC, 7 April.
7 Richwine, L. (1999), ‘US Blocking Distribution of AIDS Drugs, Critics Say’, San
Francisco Examiner, 12 April.
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 175
8 Cited in Navarro, V. (1994), The Politics of Health Policy: The US Reforms, 1980–94,
Oxford, Basil Blackwell, p. 214.
9 Love, J. (1999), personal e-mail communication, Washington, DC, 16 April.
10 Larkin, B. (1999), ‘US Government Efforts to Negotiate the Repeal, Termination or
Withdrawal of Article 15(c) of the South African Medicines and Related Substances
Act of 1997’, US Department of State report, Washington, DC, 5 February.
11 United States Congress (1998), Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency
Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999 (HR 4328), Washington, DC, 21 October.
12 Barber, S. (1998), ‘Plan Blunts Long-Term Threat to US Aid for SA’, Business Day,
20 July.
13 Mitchell, D. (1999), ‘Compulsory Licensing of Anti-HIV Drugs Stirs Debate in
Geneva’, Journal of the American Medical Association, HIV/AIDS Health
Information (Internet version), 1 April.
14 Médécins sans Frontières Health Action International and Consumer Project on
Technology (1999), ‘AIDS and Essential Medicines and Compulsory Licensing:
Summary of the 25–27 March, 1999 Geneva Meeting on Compulsory Licensing of
Essential Medical Technologies’, Geneva, 9 April.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 United States Trade Representative (1999), ‘Special 301 Review’, Washington, DC,
30 April.
19 Nader, R. (1999), ‘Medicine held Hostage by Profits’, San Francisco Bay Guardian,
28 April.
20 Love, J. (1999), ‘Gore/Mbeki Commission and Compulsory Licensing Disputes
with South Africa’, personal e-mail communication, Washington, DC, 2 April.
21 Richwine, L. (1999), ‘Gore Worked to Soften South Africa Health Law’, Reuters,
Washington, DC, 16 April.
22 Goozner, M. (1999), ‘Third World Battles for AIDS Drugs’, Chicago Tribune,
28 April.
23 Sternberg, S. (1999), ‘Victims lost in Battle over Drug Patents’, USA TODAY,
24 May.
24 Barber, S. (1998), ‘US Withholds Benefits over Zuma’s Bill’, Business Day, 15 July.
25 Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (1999), ‘PhRMA supports
USTR on South Africa’, Washington, DC, 30 April.
26 Sternberg, op. cit.
27 Bale, H. (1999), ‘IFPMA Position on Compulsory Licensing’, e-mail communication
to Treatment-access Forum (treatment@critpath.org), Geneva, 15 April.
28 Love, J. (1999), ‘Who pays What in Drug Development’, Nature, 21 January.
29 Mitsuya, H., Weinhold, K., Yarchoan, R., Bolognesi, D. and Broder, S. (1989),
‘Credit Government Scientists with Developing Anti-AIDS Drug’, New York Times,
28 September.
30 Sternberg, op. cit.
31 Love, J. (1999), ‘Statement on Bristol-Myers Squibb Announcement’, Washington,
DC, Consumer Project on Technology, 6 May.
32 Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (1999), ‘Submission for the
“Special 301” Report on Intellectual Property Barriers’, Washington, DC,
16 February.
33 Bailey, H. (1999), ‘Bitter Pills: The Battle over Prescription Drug Prices’, Center for
Responsive Politics Money in Politics Alert, 5(17), 17 May.
Chapter 8 7/22/03 6:42 pm Page 176
34 Navarro, V. (1995), ‘The Politics of Health Care Reform in the United States,
1992–94: A Historical Review’, International Journal of Health Services, 25(2),
p. 198.
35 Love, J. (1999), ‘Washington DC as a Small Town’, e-mail communication to
IP-Health (ip-health@essential.org), Washington, DC, 13 April.
36 Werner, D. and Sanders, D. (1997), Questioning the Solution: The Politics of Primary
Health Care and Child Survival, Palo Alto, HealthWrights, pp. 92–4.
37 Judis, J. (1999), ‘K Street Gore’, The American Prospect, 45, July–August.
38 Ridgeway, J. (1999), ‘Gore AIDS Scandal Helps Drug Companies nix Cheap
Medicines’, The Village Voice, June 2; Caelers, D. (1999), ‘Gore told to Ease up on
Anti-South Africa Drugs War’, Africa News Service, 18 May.
39 Corn, D. (1999), ‘Gore to South Africans: Drop Dead’, New York Press, 2 June.
40 Richwine, ‘US Blocking Distribution of AIDS Drugs, Critics Say’.
41 Kelly, E. (1999), ‘Cost of Prescription Drugs Drives Consumers to Canada’, Gannett
News Service, 21 May.
42 Quaid, L. (1999), ‘Lawmakers push for Cheaper Prescriptions’, Associated Press,
28 May .
43 Wolfe, W. (1999), ‘FDA Head tells Seniors Agency can’t Help cut Drug Costs’,
Minneapolis Star Tribune, 3 June.
44 Sanders, B., Berry, M. and Emerson, J. A. (1999), ‘Dear Colleague Letter: Help
Americans enjoy the Same Low Prescription Drug Prices as Other Countries’,
Washington, DC, US House of Representatives, 25 May.
45 Médécins sans Frontières Health Action International and Consumer Project on
Technology, ‘AIDS and Essential Medicines and Compulsory Licensing’.
46 Williams, F. (1999), ‘Campaign over Drug Licensing to Grow’, Financial Times,
29 March.
47 Russell, S. (1999), ‘New Crusade to Lower AIDS Drug Costs’, San Francisco
Chronicle, 24 May.
48 Silverman, M., Lydecker, M. and Lee, P. (1992), Bad Medicine, Palo Alto, Stanford
University Press; Werner and Sanders, op. cit., p. 95.
49 Orr, J. (1997), ‘Rexall for Profits’, Dollars and Sense, 128, July–August, p. 21.
50 Assavanonda, A. (1998), ‘NGOs Rally Against Patent Law Changes: Call on US to
Stop Pressuring Thailand’, Bangkok Post, 8 September.
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 177
CHAPTER NINE
Civil society conquest, state failure
1. Introduction
Contextualising the struggle for access to pharmaceutical treatment of
HIV/AIDS requires that we immediately confront the bizarre twists and
turns of South African policy in this regard. By illustration, consider the
argument of Thabo Mbeki’s key spokesperson on the issue (prior to his
death in late 2000). In March 2000, Parks Mankahlana off-guardedly justi-
fied to Science magazine why the SA Department of Health refused to
provide a relatively inexpensive (R100 million per year) anti-retroviral treat-
ment to pregnant, HIV-positive women: ‘That mother is going to die and
that HIV-negative child will be an orphan. That child must be brought up.
Who is going to bring the child up? It’s the state, the state. That’s resources,
you see.’1
Yet as was subsequently pointed out – and confirmed by the Department
of Health itself – the cost savings associated with treatment against mother-
to-child transmission of HIV could potentially be enormous (R700 million
per annum was one estimate).2
Thus at the Durban AIDS conference in July 2000, ANC parliament-
arian Winnie Madikizela-Mandela accused her government of being ‘an
obedient servant of multinational companies that continue to put their
profits above our people’. Acting SA Constitutional Court judge Edwin
Cameron observed, ‘The drug companies and African governments seem to
have become involved in a kind of collusive paralysis. International
agencies, national governments and especially those who have primary
power to remedy the iniquity – the international drug companies – have
failed us in the quest for accessible treatment.’3
This chapter makes the case that in spite of heroic efforts by radical civil
society groups to gain access to anti-retroviral drugs through their formi-
dable battle with multinational corporations and the White House,
Pretoria failed miserably to follow up on these efforts, and is effectively
losing the war against HIV/AIDS. To understand why it did so, at the
expense of Mbeki’s reputation, requires structural analysis of capitalism
and health.
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 178
2. Pharmaceutical pricing and street politics

South African access to HIV/AIDS drugs suddenly emerged on the world
stage when it became the first major issue in the US presidential-election
campaign of 2000. Activists now joined debates that had, until June 1999,
motivated mainly technical experts, academics, journalists, drug company
spin-doctors and bureaucrats. In South Africa, an AIDS Treatment Action
Campaign (TAC) mobilised a human chain at the US Johannesburg
consulate in July, issuing an ultimatum that if the US did not reverse its
position by October, the group would co-ordinate international protests
outside US embassies on International Human Rights Day (10 December).
ACTing UP
In the US, Gore began to come under tough pressure, as ACT UP activists
increased the profile of the issue up to the level of national media coverage
through what the Baltimore Sun newspaper described as ‘raucous demon-
strations at campaign events’ in June 1999.4 Notwithstanding a meeting
between activist leaders and top Gore officials (White House AIDS czar,
Sandra Thurman, Al Gore’s national security spokesman, Tom Rosshirt,
and Tipper Gore’s chief of staff, Clark Ray), ACT UP pledged to dog the
presidential campaign with its banners: ‘No Medical Apartheid!’, ‘Gore’s
Greed Kills!’, ‘AIDS Drugs for Africa Now!’ Gore was confronted repeat-
edly and aggressively in New Hampshire, California and Pennsylvania at
the very outset of his campaign, which he eventually lost by a few hundred
(possibly miscounted) Florida votes in November 2000.
Reflecting the politicisation of the issue, columnist Arianna Huffington
turned against former fellow Republican corporate allies:
Allowing South Africa to license domestic production of the lifesaving
drugs, known as ‘compulsory licensing’, is one of those rare issues – such as
child abuse and drunk driving – on which there cannot possibly be two
sides. After all, the country is suffering from an AIDS epidemic that our own
surgeon general has compared ‘to the plague that decimated the population
of Europe in the 14th century’. The vice president’s office says it is trying ‘to
help AIDS patients by making sure drug companies maintain profit levels to
develop new AIDS medications.’ But what good are AIDS medications if
they can’t get to the people with AIDS? And someone should remind the
vice president that last year alone the three major AIDS-drug manufacturers
– Glaxo Wellcome, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer – made respectively
$4.43 billion, $3.64 billion and $3.35 billion.5
However, the Washington Post editorialised, ‘Vice president Gore stands
accused of defending pharmaceutical industry profits at the expense of
South African AIDS patients. Welcome to campaign season. The AIDS
activists who have heckled Mr. Gore at his early appearances, seeking to
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 179
C IVIL SOCIETY CONQUEST, STATE FAILURE 179
drown him out with chants of “Gore’s Greed Kills,” manipulate the facts in
what is actually a much more complicated and interesting debate.’6
But the facts, as even the State Department acknowledged, boiled down
to the US government’s application of extraordinary pressure to a new
African democracy so as to prevent it from engaging in parallel imports and
compulsory licensing permitted by the WTO, as well as from making its
case to the wider world through speeches to international organisations.
While the context of US imperialism and multinational corporate power in
an era of globalisation conditioned all aspects of the struggle, the most
important motivating factor for Al Gore appeared to be pharmaceutical
corporation campaign contributions.
Gore retreats
Perhaps, then, the activists could counter this immediate pressure point.
For on 25 June Gore wrote a letter to black members of Congress stating
that: ‘I want you to know from the start that I support South Africa’s efforts
to enhance health care for its people – including efforts to engage in
compulsory licensing and parallel importing of pharmaceuticals – so long as
they are done in a way consistent with international agreements.’7 This was
the beginning of a climbdown on the issue, which culminated in Bill
Clinton’s concession in December 1999, at the Seattle World Trade
Organisation meeting, that generic AIDS drug production or importation
would not face US opposition.
But it soon became clear that intensified activism against and embarrass-
ment of the pharmaceutical corporations and their Northern government
backers was not sufficient to open space for more proactive Third World
health and trade ministries to keep people alive. For those very Third
World leaders – such as Mbeki – were confronted by their own perception
of reality: the economic need not to treat HIV/AIDS.
3. A political economy of South African AIDS

The larger problem here transcends the cost of anti-retroviral drugs. At a
structural level, the class/race/gender-biased character of South African
social policy under conditions of a failing neo-liberal economic strategy is
inhibiting prevention. It is this realisation that makes the dilemma for those
like Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign (see interview
below) so terribly frustrating: the enemy is not only in the New Jersey head-
quarters of pharmaceutical corporations, but in the Pretoria economic
ministries that dole out funds and attract multinational corporate invest-
ments.
Thus it becomes clearer why Mbeki spent several months in early 2000
trying (unsuccessfully) to shift attention from South Africa’s ineffective
HIV/AIDS policies: ‘We cannot blame everything on a single virus. Poverty
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 180
is the underlying cause of reduced life expectancy, handicap, disability, star-

vation, mental illness, suicide, family disintegration and substance abuse.’8
Denialism
This line of argument is also promoted by conservative ‘AIDS dissidents’,
better termed ‘denialists’ – a small, marginalised bloc of researchers who
deny a link between HIV and AIDS, instead attributing the disease to envi-
ronmental factors. But no African public-health professional needs a
lecture from University of California denialists on the relationship between
poverty and health indicators. Mbeki dropped the denialist line from public
statements late in 2000 after the confusion he was causing became unten-
able. But he didn’t give up on it, and at a media dinner with World
Economic Forum elites in Davos in January 2001 he repeatedly referred to
the possible ‘biological difference between Africans and whites’ that
affected the way the virus developed.9
Are there other explanations for Mbeki’s shocking, tragic turn to
HIV/AIDS denialism? Three come immediately to mind. The first is the
presumption made by Al Gore that US pharmaceutical companies could
get away with mauling SA’s 1997 Medicines Act, reflecting the real power
relations in global political economy, which persist even after Gore’s humil-
iating retreats in 1999–2000. Secondly, ongoing neo-liberal pressure on
South Africa’s health and welfare budgets made it easier to deny than to
treat HIV/AIDS. And thirdly, some top policy-makers in Pretoria seem ulti-
mately indifferent to the health needs of masses of superfluous low-income
people, who will never have a role as labourers in the formal capitalist
sectors of the South African economy.
Let them eat placebos

The last is most interesting/horrifying, and is least explored in public policy
discourses. Underlying the logic of denialism is a triple trumping of cost-
benefit analysis. First, the cost savings associated with future treatment only
hold true if the state healthcare system actually has capacity – and if its
personnel even intend – to care for sick HIV-positive infants. Dr Costa
Gazi, health secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress, argues that such an
assumption is now in question, and not merely because the public-health
service has collapsed in many impoverished communities. Worse, after
HIV-positive infants get treatment for an initial ailment, care-givers (mainly
grannies) are now sent home by local clinic staff in many areas, and simply
told not to return.
Secondly, a false presumption, explicit in Mankahlana’s comment given
earlier, is that the state will be forced to look after orphans. In reality, the
South African state has a practically non-existent social safety-net for black
orphans. As a result, kinship networks are the only fallback when the HIV-
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 181
positive mother dies. The orphan, whether HIV-positive or -negative, is

usually looked after by desperately poor relatives. But it is very likely that
the orphan will die by the age of five, even if she/he is HIV-negative, since
the country has amongst the world’s highest infant-mortality rates for black
children. This practical reality lowers the likelihood of a future productive
life for an AIDS orphan, even if the HIV-positive mother is treated with
anti-retrovirals.
Thirdly, what if, against all the odds, the orphan does grow up to be a
productive member of society? What jobs exist now, and will exist in the
future, for her/him? If South Africa’s 40% unemployed mass already
provides an overstocked reserve pool of labor, why keep the 50 000 or so
potentially HIV-negative children of HIV-positive mothers alive by
preventing mother-to-child transmission? Why not, to invoke the mock-
Lugano Report of brilliant social critic Susan George, allow AIDS to
‘depopulate the vast underclass’?10
A related position is that AIDS is killing workers and low-income
consumers at a time when South African elites in any case are adopting
capital-intensive, export-oriented accumulation strategies. This political-
economic condition was aired a whole decade before Mbeki’s denialist turn,
when a top bank economist, Edward Osborn, explained on US National
Public Radio: ‘As the numbers of sick and dying soar, the entire nature of
the labor market will change drastically. There is likely to be even added
incentive towards mechanisation and automation. The market could shift
from a volume market to a quality market. The overall ceiling to the domes-
tic market makes it imperative to promote South African exports and to
widen and strengthen the range of exports.’11
AIDS and neo-liberalism are thus conjoined in cause and effect. But
these are merely the most insane reasons for not treating HIV-positive preg-
nancies with anti-retrovirals, and for not taking AIDS seriously. Some
critics, like Gazi and Thomas Coates (a professor at the University of
California’s AIDS Research Institute) conclude that the SA government is
‘genocidal’.12 Making the case for mother-child transmission treatment to
the public in 1999, Gazi was suspended from a government hospital super-
visory position for asserting that the SA minister of health should be
charged with murder. Instead of shutting him up, the state made Gazi a
martyr, and in his Eastern Cape public-health practice he spent his own
money to give pregnant HIV-positive women the needed anti-retroviral
treatment.
Setting a bad precedent

The second broad point above is a fear by the state that the floodgates might
open if mother-child transmission becomes an initial wedge for providing
more general treatment to low-income people. Giving anti-retrovirals to the
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 182
country’s 4.2 million HIV-positive residents would – under present pharma-

ceutical-pricing constraints – cost roughly $12 billion per year, according to
Zwile Mkhize, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial minister of health. The vast
majority of treatment costs would have to be subsidised by a state whose
entire annual budget is less than $40 billion and whose budget for HIV
prevention is less than $25 million.
But while the cost of treatment access to all who need it did initially
appear insurmountable, two rebuttals quickly emerged. First, determina-
tions of fiscal priorities still reflect durable apartheid-era political-economic
power. The society’s transformation was closely monitored by financial
interests, who demanded drastic cuts in the state budget deficit (from 9% of
GDP in 1993 to less than 3% today), in the context of a ‘homegrown’
structural-adjustment programme and dramatic corporate tax cuts (from
48% in 1994 to 30% today). Moreover, activist campaigns like Jubilee South
Africa’s call to repudiate tens of billions of dollars in inherited apartheid-era
local and foreign debt were dismissed as dangerous by financiers and their
comprador friends in the new government’s Department of Finance.
Yet debt repayment is the second-largest budget expense, accounting for
more than $6 billion a year. A controversial new high-tech military spend-
ing package adds nearly another billion dollars a year. Dramatic shifts in
spending priorities, including a dramatic kick-start to the economy through
widespread public-works projects – which have been rejected by the neo-
liberal Department of Finance as inflationary – would change the basic
parameters.
The even more decisive rebuttal to the argument that treatment for all
HIV-positive South Africans is cost-prohibitive comes, ironically, from the
government itself. For the Medicines Act provides for the Department of
Health to override the trade-related intellectual property provisions of the
World Trade Organisation, which South Africa joined in apartheid’s dying
months. Those provisions are malleable, allowing violation of patents in
cases of extreme emergencies, such as AIDS. It should therefore have been
uncontroversial for the SA government to import cheap drugs, at less than
5% of the price they are sold at locally, from markets like India and Brazil,
or to permit local generic production of such drugs. This should have
negated the cost-prohibitive argument entirely.
But given the lucrative upper-income (mainly white) market for medi-
cines in South Africa, the major transnational pharmaceutical companies
quickly objected to the Medicines Act. The country lost many thousands of
people to curable opportunistic infections while the legality of the patent-
violation clause was contested in court. The often explicit threat was that if
the Medicines Act prevailed, the companies would disinvest from SA. This
was the third political-economic rationale for allowing the continuation of
mass death.
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 183
Pharma-corporate power
Hence after activists won the space for Pretoria to go through with compul-
sory licensing and parallel imports of cheap anti-retrovirals, Pretoria failed
to take advantage of it. Mbeki snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by
beginning his bizarre questioning of the link between the HIV virus and
AIDS. The broader war against AIDS took a quick turn for the worse. But
the fiasco unfolded not just because of Mbeki’s mercurial personality, and
won’t be resolved by a change of mind – or even by ex-President Nelson
Mandela’s closing exhortation to the Durban conference that preventing
mother-to-child transmission should be of highest priority. Necessary as
these personal interventions are, they are not sufficient.
The political-economic facts of AIDS point out the need for a yet more
profound struggle against the underlying assumptions and characteristics of
South African – and international – capitalism. Part of the problem remains
the awesome profits that private firms can achieve – and seem to feel they
have the right to achieve – through monopoly pricing power backed by
patent protection (see Table 4).
Table 4: Comparison shopping for life-giving drugs in October 200013
Product14 SA Pub. Sector SA Priv. Sector Thailand

Fluconazole (200 mg) R28.57 R80.24 R 1.78
AZT (100 mg) R 2.3815 R 5.54 R 2.38
ddI (150 mg) NA R10.90 R 6.00
d4T (40 mg) NA R26.00 R 2.75
3TC (150 mg) NA R22.80 R16.30
Nevirapine (200 mg) NA R31.75 R12.00
But this power is only as strong as the ability of pharmaceutical cor-

porations to intimidate Pretoria. This became clear in an interview with
Zackie Achmat I conducted for Multinational Monitor in January 2001. His
analysis is worth citing at length:
Multinational Monitor: You’ve led intense struggles to get better drug access
for South Africa’s 4.2 million HIV-positive people, yourself included. This
has pitted you against both multinational corporations and the South African
government, especially president Thabo Mbeki. Late last year, Mbeki report-
edly called the Treatment Action Campaign a ‘front for the drug companies’
during an internal caucus with his African National Congress members of
parliament, because of your campaign’s emphasis on treatment.
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 184
Zackie Achmat: Let’s deal with this forthrightly. Mbeki also said that TAC
had infiltrated the trade unions, and that we wanted to embarrass him
because of his statements from a year ago questioning the link between the
HIV virus and AIDS. In reality, Mbeki embarrassed himself.
As for the trade unions, they had just demanded, at their September
congress in front of Mbeki himself, that government reject this bizarre
theory of AIDS and government policy. Are we a front? We get no donations
from drug companies, and we were the first and loudest organisation to
tackle them. So after Mbeki’s outburst, we went to the South African
government Public Protector to demand that he retract the statement, but
that office hasn’t responded yet.
Meanwhile, the union leaders like Zwelinzima Vavi were furious about
this insult to their integrity. The South African Democratic Teachers Union,
for example, headlined their newspaper the next month in huge letters,
‘Sorry Mr President, we can’t infiltrate ourselves.’
MM: Mbeki soon backed down and said he wouldn’t make further state-
ments on AIDS.
ZA: Yes, but he had already done a tremendous disservice to the country,
particularly to the ANC. There is no doubt in my mind that a lot of people
didn’t vote ANC in the recent municipal election because of the AIDS issue.
The ANC vote went from 67% in the 1999 general election to 60% in
December. Thankfully, the trade unions pushed Mbeki into silence, saying
very explicitly, ‘You’re wrong on HIV and we want treatment!’
But the other point that most critics are making now is that while Mbeki
claimed that poverty was the key cause of AIDS deaths, in fact if you look at
the SA government’s position on poverty reduction, it is also a disaster. The
country’s worst-ever outbreak of cholera, which affected 12 000 people in
low-income rural areas with more than 50 fatalities during the last five
months of 2000, was catalysed by the inhuman cut-offs of clean water by
government bureaucrats because people couldn’t pay a R51 ($6.80) con-
nection fee.
TAC hopes that the ANC’s municipal election promise of free water and
free electricity is implemented, but we desperately need the leading advo-
cacy groups in South Africa, like Jubilee 2000 and Cease Fire, to work
closely with trade unions to redirect the budget to that end, and to increase
the health budget. We need a 33% increase to develop infrastructure, to
train, and to employ more staff, up from R24 billion ($3.2 billion) to
R32 billion ($4.3 billion). Recently, per-capita health spending has been
declining, which can only be considered politically irresponsible, in the
midst of the AIDS disaster.
MM: This would be aimed, mainly, at assuring all who are HIV+ ultimately
get treatment.
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 185
ZA: Yes, but for us, a move away from the multinational corporate producers
to local generic production is the only way. We actually need not only state
production of drugs, but also private generic competition here in SA.
MM: What, realistically, can you expect government to do on treatment?
ZA: We would like to see, by mid-year, the implementation of what the
government said it would do last August on prevention/treatment of
opportunistic HIV-related diseases. For example, the tuberculosis budget is
just R500 million per year, which just scratches the surface of what’s needed.
We have a TB case rate in South Africa of more than 350 per 100 000 people,
which is the world’s worst. In the mining industry, it’s as high as 3 000 per
100 000. The main problem in the lowest-income provinces is that between
a quarter and three-quarters of rural clinics don’t have TB drugs. This is
partly because of limited managerial capacity in rural areas, combined with
budget cuts, especially to hospitals, which always drop consumables like
medicines first. So the TB budget needs a massive increase.
We are also demanding introduction of cotrimoxazole to prevent PCP-
pneumonia, which kills mainly HIV+ infants. A monthly supply would cost
R4 ($0.53) for children and R8–24 ($1.06–3.18) per adult, which is a great
savings over hospitalisation costs, which are up to R150 000 per patient
($20 000). But right now, there’s not sufficient political commitment from
the government to get access to drugs even for these extremely obvious areas
of treatment.
MM: What do you say to critics who claim that expanding treatment
through cheap parallel imports, as you advocate, risks introducing drugs of
questionable quality, is infeasible due to lack of health-system capacity to
administer drugs properly, and consequently will expand drug-resistant
strains of HIV?
ZA: First, on the quality of imports, we now have official clearance to import
Fluconazole, at 2.2% of the price charged by private-sector clinics, and
we’ve shown that the drug is high quality. Even the Medicine Control
Council, which charged me with illegal importation of medicine when I
brought in 10 000 Fluconazole capsules from Thailand last year just to make
the point, also concedes that the quality is fine.
By the way, TAC is still being investigated by the SA Revenue Services for
that civil disobedience, and they’ll probably charge me for tax evasion. They
won’t get more than R2 800 from Value Added Tax on the symbolic ship-
ment I brought in, so it’s clearly petty harassment by the ANC loyalist who
runs the tax system.
Second, we should not underestimate the difficulties of providing anti-
retrovirals, and we don’t. If it’s done on the basis of a clear, well-defined
plan, it shouldn’t be beyond our capacity in South Africa to establish an
effective system for administering treatment.
Third, we agree that if you have weak implementation, drug-resistant
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 186
strains will emerge. Certainly, our health professionals need more training in
prescription techniques.
Still, 12% of new infections in the US are found to be based on drug-
resistant strains. Is anyone saying that the US must stop providing treat-
ment? Moreover, it is well known that rich countries have witnessed a
dramatic overprescription of antibiotics, leading to many kinds of drug-
resistant diseases. So this isn’t just a problem of HIV/AIDS treatment, and
we shouldn’t be the class of patients denied access as a result.
The problem of drug resistance can be addressed through other means as
well. Our private medical-aid insurance system puts an excessive limitation
on payment for therapy, which leads doctors to prescribe a dual-therapy
treatment instead of triple therapy, or even to prescribe AZT as mono-
therapy, which gives rise to much quicker drug-resistance. In addition, South
Africa is the most frequent site for clinical trials in the developing world, due
to good infrastructure. After treatment is halted when trials are finished,
there is a problem of drug resistance. But none of these problems should be
grounds for saying, no more treatment, especially since it is mainly low-
income black women who are the beneficiaries of treatment.
MM: Is the South African government moving towards establishing a clear,
well-defined plan?
ZA: Right now, the minister simply does not have a plan for anti-retrovirals.
But there are two other ministries who are also blocking progress. The
finance ministry does not provide enough money, and the ministry of trade
and industry has not taken a clear position on local production. This is
important, because the minister, Alec Erwin, is scared to offend the WTO
and the investment community by allowing local generic production. He
knows that this will send negative signals to other corporate investors.
But what these South African ministers are dead wrong about is that every
other well-informed business leader in the world now realises that unless
there is generic production, then too many people will die, and overall
health-system costs will be much higher than the cost of alienating the phar-
maceutical firms by violating their patents.
MM: It looked like you won the first major battle in the war with pharma-
ceutical companies in September 1999, when then-vice president Al Gore
agreed to back off the pressure he put on Mbeki and Erwin to withdraw a
South African law which made it possible to import drugs and license gener-
ics for local production. Then came Mbeki’s turnaround. What did you learn
from that struggle?
ZA: As I said, the bigger problem is the government’s unfounded fear of
alienating investors in general. But on the positive side, we had the most
exciting experience in rallying international solidarity since the anti-
apartheid struggle. The most helpful research organisation was the
Consumer Project on Technology. The most important voice to help gener-
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 187
ate a global consensus that drug companies were committing genocide

against the poor was Médécins sans Frontières. The most serious activists
fighting against profiteering on AIDS and other diseases were ACT UP in
New York, Philadelphia and Paris.
But what ultimately also is critical for us is the conscientisation now under
way in broader civil society, here and elsewhere. Last year, the Congress of
SA Trade Unions and their Southern African allies pushed through a resolu-
tion supportive of generics at the Durban conference of the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions. This issue is resonating with trade
unions across the South, including Korea and indeed throughout Africa.
MM: The drug companies are claiming that with their donations, they are
now doing as much as can be expected. UNAIDS is under pressure because
they aren’t monitoring the donations in Africa, but was the
UNAIDS/Industry initiative fatally flawed from the outset?
ZA: Well, first, the various donations have come only because of protest.
These are, in any case, just holding operations for the drug companies, which
hope they can delay the import or local production of generics in Africa.
And the very large South African private sector is still not covered in one of
the largest deals, between Pretoria and Pfizer, for Fluconazole.
Whatever the nature of a particular donation, we can’t afford to let up
pressure on the drug companies, otherwise prices will go way up again after
they capture the market. In any event, some of these programmes are also
financially self-interested. In Botswana, for every dollar Merck gives, the
Gates Foundation gives a dollar, which comes back to the company when
they buy Merck drugs at wholesale prices, which can be added to Merck’s
tax deduction on the donation. The big question about the drug companies’
donations is how long they can be sustained, and how many people will be
reached. Evidence so far is not encouraging.
What is, however, most disturbing about the drug companies’ philan-
thropy, is their ability to buy off potential protest from the established AIDS
organisations and researchers. Bristol-Myers-Squibb, for instance, has given
$120 million to a ‘Secure the Future’ programme over three years, directed
at women, children and NGOs. That gives them the clout to go into estab-
lished AIDS organisations and literally purchase loyalty by researchers and
NGO leaders. Some NGOs have become much less critical than they should
be. And BMS’ two drugs are ddI and D4T, which in any case were developed
by the US National Institute of Health and Yale University. Yet both are still
priced prohibitively in South Africa.
MM: Finally, from your perspective, is progress being made on a vaccine,
and how are drug companies doing in R&D more generally?
ZA: Of course we would support a vaccine, but in reality, there’s no chance
of getting even a 50% effective vaccine within 7–10 years, according to the
main scientific researchers. The World Bank, Gates and other funders,
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 5:44 pm Page 188
including our government, all hope for a magic bullet.

In the meantime, millions are due to perish, and millions more will
contract HIV. We wish they would spend a lot more of the resources now
going into vaccine work into something more practical, namely a microbi-
cide gell or spray which can prevent HIV transmission during vaginal and
anal sexual intercourse, because it kills off lots of sexually-transmitted
disease bugs. It’s much more promising, but it’s massively underfunded. I
think that so few companies are doing serious work on microbicides because
people who will use them most are poor women. If the perception within the
drug companies is that the rich, white, heterosexual market doesn’t need it,
you can expect it to become a fatally low priority.16
State failure, social struggle. The obstinacy of the Mbeki government
knew no bounds. As the class struggle associated with AIDS raged, he
misjudged friends and enemies, and hence chose disastrous strategies and
tactics. Mbeki and top officials had promoted the scam Virodene industrial
solvent while questioning the toxicity of vitally-needed (well-tested) drugs.
Notorious oddball dissidents were invited onto a presidential panel to help
explain that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, hence drugs would not help fight the
battle. In another bid to avoid increasing access to emergency anti-retroviral
treatment, senior leaders derided the accuracy of rape statistics and the
extent of HIV transmission by rape. Mbeki ignored Mandela’s July 2000
AIDS Conference advice to proceed immediately with mother-to-child-
transmission treatment, and his health officials terminated an Mpumalanga
NGO’s access to health facilities because they were offering antiretrovirals to
rape victims. The health department’s AIDS directorate didn’t spend 40%
of its budget in 1999/2000 just as the South African treatment crisis was
becoming an international scandal, while Mbeki and health officials repeat-
edly claimed that the country was too poor to provide adequate medicines.
Caught out again and again, Mbeki turned to conspiracy theory, alleging
TAC relations with drug companies and infiltration of trade unions. He
played the race card on the courageous campaigning-journalist Charlene
Smith. (At one point, the CIA also reportedly entered into Mbeki’s para-
noia.) Through such obfuscation, the South African government found a
myriad of ways to protect the very international corporations which made it
most difficult to treat AIDS.
An alternative strategy was available. Appropriate allies were all around,
including those courageous health and trade officials in other Southern
governments prepared to do battle with what blockbuster novelist John
LeCarre came to call Big Pharma. By April 2001, the court challenge by drug
companies to the Medicines Act had generated such an extraordinary back-
lash—forcing the 39 companies to withdraw their case after waves of inter-
national protest in dozens of cities, coordinated by TAC, ACT UP, Medicins
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 5:44 pm Page 189
sans Frontiers and Oxfam—that Mbeki could easily have changed direction
to widespread applause. He didn’t, and his lawyers were instructed to plead
in court that the implications of the Medicines Act would not extend to
producing generic drugs in South Africa, but only to importing drugs from
Big Pharma where they were sold cheaper abroad. Dropping its momentary
alliance with Mbeki, TAC was compelled to file case in the Constitutional
Court in mid-2001, alleging that the government’s ongoing failure to autho-
rise anti-retroviral distribution was killing Mbeki’s most loyal constituents.
Trapped like bucks in the spotlights of a speeding vehicle, Mbeki and his
colleagues stumbled ever more quickly towards the oncoming collision,
making themselves ever more vulnerable both in medical terms and in the
court of public opinion. But in doing so, the government repeatedly mistook
the economic threats associated with the AIDS wreck—Big Pharma’s
monopoly pricing power and patent protection, Trevor Manuel’s extremist
fiscal austerity, and pressure against adding to the ranks of the unemployed,
orphaned and welfare-dependent (by allowing more people to live)—as
aspects of globalisation that had to be nurtured. The fealty to neoliberalism
which Manuel had earlier termed ìmpotence’ would soon haunt South
Africa, as the president began to be termed Chief Undertaker Mbeki.
Recall the ANC discussion document cited at the end of Chapter 7, which
concluded by repudiating potential government actions that are “in discord
with the rest of the world, but which can be sustained by virtue of a volun-
tarist South African experiment of a special type, a world of anti-Apartheid
campaigners, who, out of loyalty to us, would support and sustain such
voluntarism.” In reality, the world of anti-Apartheid campaigners grew and
grew. Just over a year after the discussion document’s circulation, the
Medicines Act had become the experiment that millions of desperate people
were awaiting, poised on the line dividing life and death. And within three
years, the ANC document’s last lines had become so profoundly fallacious
that tens of thousands were dying unnecessarily, because of Pretoria’s stub-
born refusal to break the chains of global pharma-apartheid. Still, radical
groups in civil society soldiered on, and the TAC’s alliances—with trade
unions locally, and many other activists internationally—offered hope for
saving lives at home, and, abroad, for sustaining a full-fledged attack on the
international financial pillars of global apartheid. As we review in the final
Part of this book, debates over fixing or nixing the major institutions at the
nerve centre of finance would first be necessary—while incorporating the
aspirations and sensibilities of African and Third World activism—followed
by the elaboration of a concrete alternative: an experiment òf a special type’
in locking capital down, driven by coalitions of grassroots activists who
would take their inspiration from the fight for life, against the fatal combi-
nation of AIDS and economic power.
Chapter 9 /007 7/24/03 3:05 pm Page 190
would take their inspiration from the fight for life, against the fatal combi-
nation of AIDS and economic power.
Notes
1 Cited in The Citizen, 14 July 2000 and the Mail and Guardian, 21 July 2000.
Mankahlana – who a week earlier said he would toss the Durban Declaration on
AIDS signed by 5 000 people into Mbeki’s ‘dustbin’ because it strongly refuted the
AIDS-dissident camp – immediately denied making the statement: ‘Their story is
a complete fabrication.’ Science’s editor replied that his reporter had recorded
Mankahlana in his Pretoria office on 24 March, and offered to play the tape. I
include this tragic incident because, notwithstanding Mankahlana’s subsequent
denial that the statement reflected policy, there was a general sense amongst
health professionals in South Africa that the Science quote was indeed official
thinking. (Mankahlana had personal experience that is perhaps worth citing for
further context. He was, at the time of making these quotes, the target of two
paternity suits based on failure to pay child maintenance.)
2 Both the Madikizela-Mandela and Cameron quotes are from the Mail and
Guardian, 21 July 2000.
3 Both quotes in the Mail and Guardian, 14 July 2000.
4 Weisman, J. (1999), ‘Activists doubt Gore tries to Reduce Cost of AIDS Drugs:
ACT-UP, Candidate’s Staff Talk on Medicine in Africa’, Baltimore Sun, 23 June.
5 Huffington, A. (1999), ‘Pharmacologic Al’,
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/062899.html, 28 June.
6 Washington Post, 24 June 1999.
7 Gore, A. (1999), ‘Letter to James E. Clyburn, Black Congressional Caucus’, 25
June, partially published in the Multinational Monitor, January 2001.
8 Mbeki, T. (2000), ‘Welcome Address’, opening speech to the 13th Annual
International AIDS Convention, Durban, 9 July.
9 As reported to the author by a journalist at the dinner.
10 George, S. (1999), The Lugano Report, London, Pluto Press.
11 I was the reporter, and cited the comment in Bond, P. (1991), Commanding
Heights and Community Control: New Economics for a New South Africa,
Johannesburg, Ravan Press.
12 Mail and Guardian, 21 July 2000.
13 Sources: Thai GPO and Biolab; India CIPLA; South Africa Department of Health;
Private Discount Pharmacy. Prices valid as of 16 October 2000. (Drugs and
dosages are used to compare prices rather than to indicate proposed treatment
regimens.)
14 The following are the holders of the patents on the above drugs, responsible for
the extremely high prices paid by South Africans: Bristol-Myers-Squibb (ddI –
didanosine); Bristol-Myers-Squibb (d4T – stavudine); Glaxo-Wellcome (AZT –
zidovudine); Glaxo-Wellcome (3TC – lamivudine); Glaxo-Wellcome (AZT/3TC);
Pfizer (Fluconazole); Boehringer Ingelheim (Nevirapine).
15 Lower-cost AZT is the result of activism. The AZT price was reduced from R5.54
in the public sector following TAC demonstrations and protests. The same applies
to the lower cost of Nevirapine for mother-to-child transmission.
16 Edited version published in Multinational Monitor, January–February 2001.
Part 4 7/22/03 6:45 pm Page 191
PA R T FOUR
Globalisation?
Or internationalism plus the
nation state?
‘Defund the Bank, Break the Bank, and Dump the Debt’ – activists in
Prague, September 2000.
Part 4 7/22/03 6:45 pm Page 192
Top: The World Bank under siege, April 2000.

Bottom: Policing for capital, Prague, September 2000.
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 193
CHAPTER TEN
The ‘Fix-it-or-nix-it’ debate
1. Introduction
We have established, so far, that global apartheid is no accident, but is a
logical outcome of the operations of international capitalism at the turn of
the 21st century. We have correlated the rise of financial and commercial
dynamism and power to the underlying economic slowdown during the last
quarter of the 20th century. We have seen how that power intimidated the
nationalist leadership of even a newly liberated society like South Africa.
We have considered the ideology that supports and reflects financial and
commercial power, namely neo-liberalism. We observed how neo-liberalism
– particularly the freeing of barriers to financial, trade and investment flows
– serves the interests of multinational corporations and banks, and explic-
itly threatens the lives of those whose need for even essential goods and
services is frustrated by financial turbulence, property rights and other
manifestations of irrational market power. And we have located the ‘brain’
and ‘nerve centre’ of neo-liberalism in two Washington-based institutions –
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – as well as in the
Geneva-based World Trade Organisation. This chapter considers the
strategic implications of these findings, from the standpoint of the progres-
sive ‘global justice movements’ described in Chapter five.
The two once-impenetrable international public-financial institutions
came into focus for a critical mass of activists at the turn of the century, in
a way that in turn sharpened what were previously quite fuzzy discussions
surrounding globalisation and popular resistance. The point of departure
for that focus was mid-April 2000, when an estimated 30 000 protesters
joined the ‘Mobilization for Global Justice’ in Washington, capping a week
that began ominously with a poorly attended Jubilee 2000 USA debt-relief
rally on 9 April (controversially addressed by neo-liberal Clinton econo-
mist Gene Sperling). In the middle of all this was a ‘No Blank Check for
China’ demonstration of 15 000 workers – from the right wing of the
American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organizations
(AFL-CIO) – at the Capitol building on 12 April, which raised the spectre
of a new ‘yellow peril’ campaign. The international economic debate in the
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 194
194 G LOBALISATION ? O R INTERNATIONALISM PLUS THE NATION STATE ?
US was bedeviled, it appeared up until 16–17 April, by the standard twin

evils of reformism and narrow, xenophobic protectionism.
Auspiciously, in contrast, the bulk of the protesters on 16–17 April rallied
around a call for the IMF and World Bank to be closed down (not reformed),
taking further the street slogan that had divided the two main blocs of
demonstrators in Seattle at the World Trade Organisation meeting 18 weeks
earlier. On that occasion, younger, militant activists engaging in a ‘lockdown’
in the streets to prevent WTO delegates from meeting were on one side, and
on the other were those tens of thousands of ordinary workers channelled by
the US labour and environmental movement leaderships away from the
Seattle Convention Centre into a holding area, where they were prevented by
marshals from supporting the demonstrators.1 The AFL-CIO leaders and
moderate environmentalists merely wanted access to the negotiating table,
where their agenda was to reform the multinational-corporate trading system
by adding clauses providing for labour and ecological protections.
In Washington, however, the 16 April protest was endorsed by organised
labour, the programme was internationalist in character and Third World
activists were prominent guests. Momentum was thus captured by the far
more radical Mobilization, and enormous ideological progress and political
maturity were claimed and consolidated. 16–17 April was built upon a
militant platform and slogan – ‘Break the Bank, Defund the Fund, Dump
the Debt!’ – promoted by a strong, diverse coalition of forces. Skilfully, the
Mobilization’s official core of left-leaning Washington think-tank and NGO
staff2 helped to at least temporarily merge the very different agendas of
reformist bureaucrats and grassroots activists. Labour/NGO/green officials
historically wobbled when faced with global political-economic issues, as a
result of factors that included the disadvantageous balance of forces prior
to Seattle, their often debilitating ties to the Democratic Party (and fears of
being seen in alliance with Republican IMF/World Bank bashers), and an
apparent professionalism heightened by dependence upon bourgeois
funders. The AFL-CIO had even supported the $18 billion recapitalisation
of the IMF in late 1998, after making some kind of obscure deal with Bill
Clinton.
The activists, in contrast, were anxious to conduct a joyous symphony of
Seattle-like lockdowns and street parties to blockade the IMF/World Bank
spring meetings. To do so, they introduced a cultural-liberation ambience
virtually unknown to Washington, utilising radical participatory democracy
and affinity-group cell-structuring in strategy sessions and trainings, facili-
tated by striking young talents from the Direct Action Network. In this
milieu, Z’s Michael Albert reported:
The various tactical wings of the movement – whether seeking to get
arrested, to militantly protest, to make a public but peaceful statement, or
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 195
T HE ‘ FIX - IT- OR - NIX - IT ’ DEBATE 195
just to learn or teach – worked together marvelously. Diverse tactics did not
trump one another. Tension was minimal. Intercommunication was con-
siderable. Coalitions were strengthened rather than dissolving into tactical
disputes. There was in-the-street mutual aid, careful planning of venues and
events, and pre-demonstration communication of aims.3
Results included abundant forms of civil disobedience and 1 300 arrests
(although the first 600 were unwilling, as police used dramatic force during
an 15 April Free Mumia protest march and also closed the activists’
Convergence Centre on absurd fire-code charges). Encouragingly, unlike
Seattle, the 1 000-strong Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc of black-clad
anarchists worked in harmony with those carrying out civil disobedience,
and had the honour of attracting a police helicopter devoted solely to trail-
ing their movements across Washington on 16 April.
But most importantly for my purposes in this chapter, the Mobilization
drew the eco-socio-economic concerns of the Global South far deeper into
the fabric of the US movement than ever before. Granted, the protest failed
to obstruct the IMF/World Bank meetings (the Washington police spread
protest-boundary perimeters widely, paralysing over 90 city blocks in the
centre of town, but also gaining the physical space required to sneak several
hundred delegates into the meeting at 5 a.m. on the two mornings, while
groups of 100–500 protesters subsequently clogged 18 intersections and
turned away numerous late-rising delegates). No matter, the combination of
thorough preparation and the large size of the turnout in Washington:
helped raise public consciousness about the IMF and World Bank to
unprecedented levels;
brought sympathetic activists from different constituencies into success-
ful coalition;
taught organisers a great deal about Washington logistics (and how they
can be gummed up next time);
showed South allies the extent of solidarity possibilities, encouraging them
to intensify their own local critiques of the IMF/World Bank; and also
facilitated a long-overdue split amongst development NGOs (a group of
22 conservative organisations sent a bizarre, self-discrediting endorse-
ment note to the IMF and World Bank).
The Washington protests set an excellent stage for several years of intense
grassroots campaigning aimed at closing down the Bretton Woods twins,
thus fundamentally reorienting our understanding of development finance,
and in the process realigning power relations in ways that could benefit
democratic political movements across the South. This chapter makes the
case that just such an aim should be amongst the highest priorities of those
(especially Northerners) who are supportive of global justice.
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 196
There remains, of course, a standard concern on the Left, namely,

whether the activist focus on the institutional forms of global-capitalist
(mis)management – the IMF, World Bank and WTO – risks detracting from
understanding both the capital-accumulation process and class-based
resistance, hence leading to partial and imperfect strategic insights about
power and social transformation.4 There are also mixed views emerging
amongst progressive scholars and activists about the optimal scale
(national, regional and global) at which politics and policy should be resis-
ted and perhaps even reconstructed.
Such debates resonate throughout this chapter, which first attempts to
summarise why so many activists are now intent on ‘nixing’ – not fixing –
the IMF and World Bank (Section 2). We then interrogate divergent lines
of thinking about the IMF, World Bank and international capitalism, both
between reformers and radicals (Section 3) and within the radical camp
(Section 4). Finally, we brainstorm about the different tactical ways forward
for the global justice movements, particularly in relation to the debate over
whether a World Bank is even needed in the Third World (Section 5). The
next chapter locates these dynamics more explicitly in Third World social,
labour and environmental activism.
What, then, are the central intellectual and practical dilemmas surround-
ing the emergence of an embryonic world ‘state’ based in Washington, and
how do these debates relate to street-level consciousness, and to strategies
and tactics adopted by leading campaigners for global justice? Once these
questions have been answered, we can conclude that, as an inspired tactic,
‘bond-boycotting’ the World Bank should be supported as an integral,
unifying component – and excellent local approach – within the broader
mobilisation for class, gender, ethnic and environmental justice.
2. The World Bank under siege

The year 2000 was by no means the first time that activists united in mass
numbers at an IMF/World Bank office. Each time since around 1979 that
Washington increased the pressure on Africa and the Third World gener-
ally, social pain generated resistance. For most of the first two decades, this
mainly took the form of ‘IMF riots’ that were unsustained, chaotic and
often self-destructive. The next chapter considers the maturing of Third
World protest into more formidable, sustained protest.
Surprisingly, during the late 1990s, an equivalent degree of anger
emerged in the North (beyond sites such as South-Central Los Angeles,
often considered part of the ‘global South’). After numerous discreet, frag-
mented attacks on particular global-elite initiatives and corporations, it was
astonishing how cogently ‘anti-globalisation’ protests were suddenly
directed towards nerve centres of the international financial and trading
system, in cities like Seattle, Washington and Prague. The idea that tens of
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 197
thousands of people would converge with the aim of disrupting the IMF,
World Bank and WTO gatherings of elite rulers and corporate chiefs as a
movement, would have been dismissed as a leftist fantasy during the late
1990s, but after Seattle, anything seemed possible.
April in Washington
Consider the circumstances of April 2000 at the IMF/World Bank head-
quarters in Washington, at the obscure spring meeting attended by only a
few hundred officials. Although in Berlin (1988) and Madrid (1994),
previous IMF/World Bank annual meetings attracted tens of thousands of
demonstrators, the mass of the US population had never cared much about
the Bretton Woods institutions. Likewise, US leftists long suffered an
inward-looking history, broken only occasionally by solidarity struggles
against Spanish fascism, the Vietnam War, apartheid and Central American
terror. Conditions for activism against global-scale institutions were notori-
ously lacking in Washington during the Cold War, until trade unions, envi-
ronmentalists and the Ralph Nader organisation Public Citizen put the
Seattle WTO meeting on the protest map on 30 November 1999.
A closer examination of Washington’s opponents is in order.5 The ‘N30’
and ‘A16’ protests (so-called because of the dates of their occurrences)
broadened and deepened the existing left-wing but technicist critiques of
the WTO, IMF and Bank. The WTO attracted domestic dissent partly on
the basis of its explicit threat to US environmental and labour standards.
Mass consciousness against globalisation was already increasing dramati-
cally, in the wake of specific campaigns against, amongst others, oil compa-
nies, textile/clothing sweatshops, fast-food outlets, shoe firms, chemical
and biotech companies, advertising agencies and even coffeehouse chains.6
Key events that brought large numbers together in coalition included the
North American Free Trade Agreement debate in 1993, the Vancouver
protest against the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in 1997,
successful attacks on Clinton’s proposed Fast-Track Trade Negotiating
Authority in 1997 and on the OECD’s Multilateral Agreement on
Investment in 1998.
Yet these precursors were relatively sporadic and disconnected from the
base. And as was often remarked, the ideological diversity of the protesters
still proved a major stumbling block. However, while there was no obvious
grounds for protest co-ordination, and while the particular demonstrations
are mainly defensive – ‘against’ some or other attack upon basic socio-
economic and democratic rights – the exuberance must, eventually, cohere
in programmatic terms. At some point soon, the movement could throw up
not only that which it is ‘for’ – as have the Zapatistas, who served as a cata-
lyst for rebellious spirit, with their Intergalactic Encounters For Humanity,
Against Neoliberalism – but also a rough outline of the strategy and
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 198
alliances needed to realise more universal ambitions, transcendent of

communitarianism.
For and against

Until then, semantics should not confuse the movement’s fairly clear orien-
tation. Protests have come down explicitly against large corporations, the
commodification of daily life, the commercialisation of culture, the destruc-
tion of indigenous livelihoods, the intensification of patriarchy, the fouling
of the environment and the construction of undemocratic, world-state
institutions in Washington and Geneva. The movement is, quite simply,
against uneven capitalist development, in this its purest, most international
neo-liberal stage.
What the movement is for can only be sensed through exploring the
organic demands that arise from a myriad of concrete struggles, e.g. afford-
able drinking water in Bolivian cities and historic, sustainable systems of
irrigation in the Thai countryside, jobs in a pseudo-liberated Johannesburg
and energy in oil-rich Lagos, a softer economic landing in Seoul,
transparency in Washington, community in London, national economic
sovereignty in New Delhi, and so forth. Although it is too early to say this
with certainty, it would appear that the ‘decommodification’ and ‘destrati-
fication’ of basic goods/services, respect for ethnic identity and indigenous
culture, deracialised and degendered access to resources, and recognition
of ecological integrity will all have to be intertwined threads in whatever
programmatic fabric is ultimately woven. As I will argue in the next chap-
ter, African social struggles are already defining these objectives with a
surprising degree of detail.
All things considered, it is evident that from an existing patchwork quilt
of diverse struggles, a formidable movement for social justice is emerging to
engage simultaneously in international relationship-building, ‘policy advo-
cacy’ (i.e. concrete socio-economic demands), local empowerment, and
militant campaigning for national democratic processes that surmount the
barriers erected by both domestic state bureaucrats and Washington’s inter-
national financial bureaucrats. To these ends, shutting down the WTO, IMF
and World Bank is a logical strategy that brings the movement together at
the international level, so that its particular components are more free and
powerful to carry through their local projects.
Not constrained, at this stage, by a typical party-political aim of taking
state power, the movement’s leading cadres will probably have to await
more opportune conditions before making either an electoral or insurgent
run at their own states (whether at national, provincial or municipal levels).
Once having done so, they will also have to remember that top-down radi-
cal reforms must always be conjoined with constant pressure from mass-
democratic labour, community and related organisations emanating from
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 199
below.7 A hopeful sign is the movement away from NGO jaw-jaw sessions
over potential reforms of the IMF and World Bank to radical activism.
Eluding the co-option trap

Indeed, to sense the new dynamic, it is worth recalling that until 2000, the
merits of abolishing the IMF and World Bank were outside the bounds of
acceptable discussion in NGO circuits. The Economist captured at least
something of World Bank president James Wolfensohn’s charm, shortly
after Seattle:
The 50 Years is Enough campaign of 1994 was a prototype of Seattle
(complete with activists invading the meeting halls). Now the NGOs are
surprisingly quiet about the World Bank. The reason is that the Bank has made
a huge effort to co-opt them. James Wolfensohn, the Bank’s boss, has made
‘dialogue’ with NGOs a central component of the institution’s work. More
than 70 NGO specialists work in the Bank’s field offices. More than half of
World Bank projects last year involved NGOs. Mr Wolfensohn has built
alliances with everyone, from religious groups to environmentalists. His efforts
have diluted the strength of ‘mobilisation networks’ and increased the relative
power of technical NGOs (for it is mostly these that the Bank has co-opted).8
Yet in the wake of Seattle and a meeting in Johannesburg of the radical
Jubilee South movement,9 slumbering Washington NGO-technocrats
awoke with a start. The 50 Years is Enough coalition took ever-tougher
positions and injected excellent content into the imagery and slogans of the
A16 actions, i.e. ‘Defund the Fund, Bankrupt the Bank and Dump the
Debt!’ Just as importantly, the mass-popular outpourings in Seattle,
Washington and Prague turned the broader relationship between NGO
strategists and grassroots campaigners on its head.
The more radical activists from the base increasingly served not just as
hands and feet, but also as the movement’s eyes, ears and brains. The Direct
Action Network brought an unprecedented dose of participatory democ-
racy to Washington, as hundreds of spokes-council representatives strate-
gised long into the nights during the week preceding 16 April. From San
Francisco, Global Exchange continued its key ideological role, Ruckus
Society did excellent training, the Rainforest Action Network helped with
direct action, and the International Forum on Globalization sponsored a
well-attended teach-in. A new generation of Washington-based radicals
emerged quickly from obscure networks, NGOs and think-tanks, i.e.
50 Years is Enough, Alliance for Global Justice, Center for Economic and
Policy Research, Center for Economic Justice, the Nader group Essential
Action, and Jobs with Justice. Key activists from these groups managed to
pull along many of their somewhat frightened Washington colleagues to
welcome the influx of radicals and guide the protesters.
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 200
The police won elite praise for ‘saving Washington’ (see above).
However, the cops’ amateurishly repressive streak was disclosed by the
clumsy way they shut the protesters’ Convergence Centre on the morning
of 15 April and the brutal means by which they rounded up an initial
600 protesters (plus bystanders) – not to mention 50 giant papier-mâché
puppets – at a Mumia Abu-Jamal support rally that afternoon.
Likewise, actions against the IMF and World Bank annual meeting in
Prague on 26 September 2000 had similar dynamics. Thousands of protest-
ers were denied entry to the Czech Republic, yet 15 000 did manage to
gather in protest streams leading up to a key bridge in the vicinity of the
meetings. Small groups of militant anarchists – joined by documented
provocateurs from the Prague police – tossed rocks and even molotov cock-
tails from sites very close to the hall. The bankers’ meeting had to be closed
a day early, as a direct result of the mayhem.10
As a result, logistical struggles against the Washington centres of inter-
national financial power will transpire again, with even more intense
confrontations likely. It may even be possible at the IMF/World Bank
annual meeting in September 2001 for tens of thousands of activists to
cause sufficient chaos to prevent business-as-usual by the 5 000 delegates.
Wolfensohn has already begun to publicly ask whether it is possible – and
safe – to hold these meetings in future, given the persistence of the demon-
strators.
A radical movement mainstream?

But the movement’s strategies are not based solely upon convening large
numbers of people outside gatherings of important bureaucrats. Its matur-
ing political analysis leaves the biggest impression. Thus in April, in
Washington, it could not have escaped the notice of mainstream organisa-
tions – trade unions, big environmental groups and the development
NGOs – that the demonstrations that most angrily attacked the IMF and
the World Bank attracted by far the most people of any events during the
week of protest, even though 16 April had the least institutional backing.
The direct action and parallel rally of the Mobilization for Global Justice
represented the core sentiments of the growing movement. In contrast to
conventional wisdom, the call to ‘Defund the Fund, Break the Bank and
Dump the Debt’ outdid the weaker call of Jubilee 2000 USA for limited debt
relief with strings attached. The same radical sentiments were evident in
Prague, where at the famous debate within Prague Castle on
23 September, Wolfensohn, IMF managing director Horst Kohler and the
institutions’ South African chairperson, finance minister Trevor Manuel,
were unable to dissuade key progressive spokespeople from maintaining the
call for abolition. Abolition as a strategy pursued through the ‘World Bank
Bonds Boycott’ tactic, which I will explain below, has already generated
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 201
impressive momentum, with three major US West Coast cities (Berkeley,

Oakland and San Francisco) and major socially responsible investment funds
committing themselves not to buy the bonds within their first six months.
Such militancy, however, must now not only be amplified in coming
demonstrations, but it has also to be captured back within a programmatic
vision of ‘development’ beyond what is now on offer, i.e. to seek out de-
commodified, destratified, degendered and environmentally responsible
development strategies. ‘Fixers’, however, still pose a threat to such visions.
3. Reformers run into trouble

It is worth dwelling on the fact that a large body of more conservative
Washington NGOs, labour groups, environmental lobbies and develop-
ment think-tanks will probably continue to slow this progress down. A few
sites of debate can be briefly surveyed.
Co-opted NGOs
Perhaps most notable as a symbol of what is wrong with the mentality that
wants to work within the system, an ‘Interaction 22’ grouping of US-based
NGOs, all funded by the neo-liberal US Agency for International
Development, wrote a letter to World Bank president James Wolfensohn on
14 April 2000, two days before the main protest at the spring meetings.
They expressed ‘deep concern at the impression created by some of our
NGO colleagues in the streets this week that the World Bank and the IMF
are at serious loggerheads with the entire not-for-profit community … We
have a very different perspective on recent positive directions taken by the
Bank’.11
Inside the World Bank, chief NGO liaison official John Clark – formerly
a leading World Bank critic based at Oxfam UK – issued an e-mail memo
to colleagues a few days later, ridiculing the Interaction 22 for being ‘much
less skeptical about these reforms than most of us inside the Bank!’.
However, pursuing triage, he also identified what he termed a ‘dilemma’ for
a middle-ground group of NGOs, namely, ‘how to respond to the demo
organisers’ request to all NGOs to boycott all meetings with the Bank and
Fund … For some the compromise was to take part in meetings with Bank
staff off the premises (some said this was because they didn’t want to be
seen and identified by demonstrators and be accused of co-option); but
others – notably Jubilee 2000 [US] – were quite open that they intended to
ignore the request.’12
Such divisions and even ruptures are probably inevitable, not only
amongst petit-bourgeois NGO cadres, but across the political spectrum, as
the world economy continues on its volatile, apparently self-destructive
course. The global establishment also writhes with conflict, including
squabbles in 1999–2000 over US vetoes of proposed new WTO and IMF
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 202
managers; over the US congressional ‘Meltzer Commission’ in February

2000, which advocates substantial downsizing of the IMF and World Bank;
and over the breakdown between US, European and allied Southern nego-
tiating partners at the World Trade Organisation ministerial summit in
Seattle.
Washington’s left-wing opposition is just as likely to reproduce long-
standing, self-defeating tendencies – sectarianism, nationalist-revivalism
and reformism/demobilisation – in the period just ahead, as it is to gravi-
tate towards more radical syntheses within the diverse component parts of
the movement, in the varied settings around the world, through the uneven
impulses that can be found within it. Still, the oppositional processes are
definitely under way, and worthy of celebration at this juncture. It is no
insult to what has been achieved this far to note that strategic interventions
are continually required to maintain, nurture and align a radical inter-
nationalism within the movement.
In this, it must be conceded, the petit-bourgeois strategists are still de-
fining much of the terrain, the slogans and the ‘alternative’ ideas. Feuds
within the ranks are important, obvious and deserving of debate. NGO
Stalinism made open and frank disagreement terribly difficult at times. But
of the various strategic currents in the movement, only one – campaigning
to abolish the IMF, World Bank and WTO – will take us to the mass base of
the movement’s leading edge. Unfortunately, a residual bloc of big-labour
officials and moderate debt-campaign bureaucrats remain ambivalent or
even opposed to this agenda, in a conflict that should first be reviewed.
Labour lurches
By early 2000, two controversial Clinton-administration trade deals (the
US-China agreement and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act) faced
stiff opposition from domestic constituencies, and the corporatist Advisory
Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations broke apart thanks to a walk-
out by justifiably frustrated AFL-CIO leaders. At about the same time,
Business Week reported that nine out of ten US residents polled labelled
themselves either ‘fair traders’ or ‘protectionist’, with just one in ten identi-
fying her/himself as a ‘free trader’. Clinton’s trade policy was generally
understood, according to the main survey on the topic, to serve the interests
of multinational corporations ‘too much’ (according to 54% of respon-
dents) and working Americans ‘too little’ (according to 72%).13
In this unusual US context, the movement against globalisation was radi-
calised. The logistics of the Seattle protest had distinguished stodgy, suited
leaders from front-line labour, social and environmental movement
activists. Whether the WTO should be a site of ‘reform’ – usually through
introducing social, labour and environmental conditions, known as ‘Social
Clauses’, to trade agreements – came under fierce debate. For although
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 203
some Southern trade unions backed the Social Clause strategy through their
(often subordinate) role in the International Confederation of Free Trade
Unions, many influential Southern social-movement leftists condemned it
for leaving in place the existing anti-democratic structure of the inter-
national trading system. To improve the WTO, they argued, simply ampli-
fies imperialist power relations.14 The point, instead, should be to attack the
power that the WTO has to overrule and undermine international agree-
ments and national laws that protect human rights and the environment
(e.g. a selective-procurement law in Massachusetts, directed against Burma
and ruled illegal by the WTO), and to find effective means to defend these
rights.
Because his administration’s efforts to politically rehabilitate the ‘free
trade’ agenda were to some extent blocked by organised labour and envi-
ronmentalists, Bill Clinton announced apparent support for the Social
Clause in the wake of the Seattle protests (his officials immediately
announced that he ‘misspoke’ on the issue, however). Some groups, includ-
ing conservative leadership factions within Northern trade unions, would
no doubt have been happy to settle for lip service to an unenforceable
Social Clause in exchange for allowing a new WTO Millennium Round to
go forward. But these forces were successfully marginalised, and found
themselves neither strong enough to sell the strategy to the broader move-
ment nor to inject Social Clauses into the Clinton administration’s Africa
and China trade pacts.
But a serious danger of backsliding emerged in the wake of Seattle,
namely the xenophobia encapsulated in the slogan of the Naderite organ-
iser Mike Dolan: ‘China, we’re coming atcha!’ If trying to keep China out
of the WTO in early 2000 was the ‘proxy for all our concerns about
globalisation’, as the AFL-CIO’s Denise Mitchell had it, then the global
labour movement would suffer. US-based journalist and social critic
Alexander Cockburn rightly concluded that the responsibility of labour
and social movements lay elsewhere:
There’s no win-win situation for workers of the world, in the current era at
least. American steelworkers here do better, ergo Russian and South Korean
steelworkers overseas do worse. A garment worker here loses a job, a Central
American makes a dime. Capitalism dictates the choices. So what can we do
here? I don’t think we should be trying to fix up the WTO or keep China
out. That’s not the sort of currency radicals should have truck with. Our
currency is solidarity.15
As I will discuss in more detail in Chapter eleven, the Congress of South
African Trade Unions followed a slippery logic and strategy with Southern
African trade unions similar to that of the AFL-CIO, generating conflict in
the process.16 (For US labour, there is a preferable strategy to tinkering
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 204
with trade deals and the WTO, i.e. one of either attacking particular
corporations (consistent with solidarity campaigning principles), or
passing restraining legislation against transnational corporations, similar in
scope to the 1977 US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which penalises
specific firms – not the countries they victimise – for explicitly anti-social
behaviour.)17
Debt debate
Similarly, the international movement against Third World debt was
divided through the late 1990s between, on the one hand, reformers in
Jubilee 2000’s US, British, German and Japanese networks, who largely
accepted the framework imposed by the IMF, World Bank and G-8
countries, and on the other, radicals in Jubilee South and allied Northern
groups (especially Jubilee Canada), who attempted to break open that
framework. The latter camp included critics who viewed campaigns against
debt as inextricably linked to fighting structural adjustment in general – at
national policy level or in very direct forms such as the privatisation of
municipal utilities – and the power of the IMF and World Bank in parti-
cular. Fortunately, in early 2001, Jubilee US began moving to this position.
As I will discuss in the next chapter, leading African Jubilee proponents
tended to be more structuralist and also more militant, especially chapters
in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Malawi. When the Jubilee 2000
South Summit convened in Johannesburg in November 1999 and Dakar,
Senegal in December 2000, the best social movement leaders and activists
from Africa met partners from around the Third World, and resolved to
pressure their respective national leaders to collectively repudiate the
debt.18 The Jubilee Summit also called for the closure of the IMF and
World Bank.
In contrast, some Jubilee chapters in the North were directed by NGO
and mainstream-church staff who preferred keeping economic policies out
of the discussion, and who consciously acceded to the frames of reference
of the IMF, World Bank and G-8 finance ministers. They persistently
compromised on partial debt-forgiveness/relief – the ‘unrepayable’ debt of
the poorest countries – not cancellation or reparations. They conceded that
even meagre portions of relief (e.g. in Mozambique, as discussed in Chapter
three) must be linked to structural-adjustment policies that left the IMF
and World Bank in control of Southern economies, and barely blinked at
the IMF’s renaming of these policies as ‘poverty reduction’. Worst of all,
they embraced the false claim that the IMF and the World Bank needed
more funding from taxpayers in the G-8 countries in order to compensate
for the fraudulent, highly conditional debt relief. And if this strategy was a
disaster, so too was the conservative Jubilee faction’s sense of tactics, as they
insisted on no threat of any kind, particularly on the funding front.
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 205
The limits of reformism

What would reformers claim to have achieved with their mild-mannered
approach to the IMF and World Bank, and what are the limits of the gains
won to date? In areas including environment, gender, transparency, partici-
pation and post-Washington Consensus economics, it is important to eval-
uate the balance sheet.
Some reforms, like transparency and participation with civil society, were
easily ignored or manipulated. After a critical mass of problems in projects
were exposed, the World Bank set up the ‘World Bank Inspection Panel’
within the institution. Its skimpy oversight power was soon whittled back
after it made a few telling criticisms of South governments, and in any case
the panel failed to critically examine key projects in which World Bank
malfeasance was obvious. (I considered the attempt by South Africans to
contest the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in Chapter three, above.)
Other apparent gains in the environmental and gender-and-development
spheres were corrupted immediately by neo-liberalism, whether in pushing
women’s microcredit as a safety net for defunded social policy, or in
commodifying natural ecological processes. Environmental-impact assess-
ments might be added to projects at the last minute, but rarely halted the
approval of new hydrocarbon power plants that soon made the World Bank
the world’s leading contributor to global warming. Lawrence Summers,
chief economist at the World Bank, was ironic, perhaps, but spot-on when
remarking in the infamous internal memo leaked to The Economist prior to
the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, ‘I think the economic logic of dumping a
load of toxic waste on the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should
face up that.’19
Another telling experience was that of Herman Daly, the creative envi-
ronmental economist who left the World Bank’s employ greatly dis-
gruntled.20 Still, empowered by the World Bank’s plagiarism of NGO
rhetoric, some inside-the-Beltway policy-makers (e.g. in the often-
admirable international-advocacy office of Friends of the Earth) even
suggested a dramatic switch in World Bank lending towards sectors like
basic education. The slogan this invoked – ‘Public funds for public good’ –
was fundamentally misguided, as we will observe below.
Indeed, the hardest area to reform would be the deeply rooted fealty to
neo-liberalism of IMF/World Bank economists. Dishonesty in economic
analysis finally caught up with the Bretton Woods twins during the late
1990s emerging-markets crises. The ideology of the Washington Consensus
was thoroughly discredited, and for a brief while it appeared that the World
Bank’s obvious interpretation of the East Asian Miracle, as debunked by
Robert Wade,21 would be reversed by the arrival in 1997 of an honest and
open-minded chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, from service as frustrated
chief of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors.
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 206
But even though Stiglitz offered very little substantive policy change in
his ‘information-theoretic’ critique of market imperfections, and even
though his Post-Washington Consensus did not break from most neo-
liberal shibboleths,22 he was roundly despised by IMF and US Treasury
staff. Within 30 months, after robust debates over IMF competence, he was
pushed overboard. Stiglitz diplomatically claimed to have jumped ship, in
order to have more freedom to launch his critiques – such as a scathing
attack in New Republic in April in which he slated ‘third-rank economists
from first-rate universities’.23 But according to a reliable World Bank insider
quoted in the February 2000 issue of Left Business Observer, US treasury
secretary Summers ‘made it clear that if Wolfensohn wanted a second term
as World Bank president – to start on 1 June 2000 – Stiglitz had to go’.
In sum, IMF/World Bank reforms haven’t worked, and serious reform-
ers have been pushed out or have quit in disgust. The latest gambit, the
announcement in October 1999 of the ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper’
(PRSP) as central to future IMF/World Bank activity in any developing
country, was revealed as a scam in May 2000, in the institution’s own main
pilot case, Bolivia. According to an NGO reportback, ‘The IMF resident
representative in Bolivia remarked that although the PRSP would take civil
society’s recommendations into account, the macroeconomic targets
previously agreed to by the Bolivian government were by no means open to
negotiation … The presenters of this macroeconomic model did not
adequately respond to questions from the audience on how their approach
differs at all from the past.’24
A month earlier, at the height of the Bolivian water privatisation crisis
(generated by explicit World Bank advice which sent water prices soaring
to more than a quarter of a typical household’s wage packet), Wolfensohn
himself unveiled his own lack of comprehension: ‘The biggest problem with
water is the wastage of water through lack of charging,’ he pronounced on
12 April at a press conference, when asked about the World Bank’s role in
the Cochabamba crisis. ‘In the riots that you had in Bolivia – which, I’m
happy to say, are now quieting down – it was about a new dam, a new
power, in (sic) which the Bank on this occasion had nothing to do.’25 His
entire answer was fallacious, and the leader of the Cochabamba protests,
trade unionist Oscar Olivera, took the opportunity in October 2000, in the
wake of a new round of protest, to join several South Africans in a North
American tour to support the World Bank Bonds Boycott initiative.
At precisely the same time, as I will discuss in the next chapter,
Wolfensohn’s Africa department was insisting on full-cost-recovery
strategies for even basic water supplies. The one reform that appeared
appropriate at this point was an October 2000 Congressional prohibition
on the World Bank invoking user fees on Third World education and health
services, which was mainly an ideological victory over neo-liberalism.
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 207
Turning to the right?

A final point is that the US Right also mulls over abolition/reform. Aside
from predictable hard-right rabble-rousers, even high-profile establishment
conservatives (including incoming undersecretary of the Treasury, John
Taylor, when he was a Stanford professor) began calling for the closure of
the Bretton Woods institutions in the wake of their hapless management of
the East Asian crisis, as noted in Chapter 5. Subsequently, the
Republican-dominated Meltzer Commission reported to Congress that the
IMF and World Bank were so badly warped that they must shrivel, quite
dramatically, before being straightened out.
On such a terrain, it is not unusual to find tactical intersections where
Right meets Left. These are worth worrying about, although a key Left navi-
gator – Nader advisor Rob Weissman of Multinational Monitor magazine –
insisted recently, ‘For now, we’re so relatively powerless compared to [the
IMF and World Bank], our primary mission is to restrain their power. So
it’s less important to focus on the day when we run global institutions than
on limiting the harm that they do.’26
4. Strategic divergences on the left

In contrast to the political strategy of national, and potentially regional,
democratic reconstruction from a militant local base, the case for an alter-
native conception of feasible global politics must also be aired. This
approach envisages generating seeds in the present of a future democratic
world state cast in the image of the global working class. The point here is
to contend with both capital’s internationalism as well as ‘global gover-
nance’ challenges, e.g. environmental protection, wealth redistribution,
peace-keeping, human rights policing, etc. But how realistic and appro-
priate is this strategic approach? We begin by reviewing some of the key
intellectual arguments.
A world state ahead?

Quite a hot debate rages within the World Systems branch of sociology
about the character of strategic engagement with the globalisation process.
It is helpful to draw out the arguments to illustrate the strategic options.
Perhaps the strongest possible case in favour of a ‘world state’ was a book
published in 1992 by Warren Wagar,27 positing a global social-democratic
political party taking control of world government midway through the
21st century. This general theme has circulated for some time, and The
Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism, a forthcoming book by Terry Boswell and
Chris Chase-Dunn,28 makes the argument forthrightly:
a world polity of global institutions, for the first time ever in world history,
is becoming capable of directing the processes of the modern world-system
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 208
… ‘Global governance’ has increased geometrically in the period following

World War II as the strength of a globally-oriented world bourgeoisie has
increased vis-a-vis the nationally-oriented fractions of capital. These
processes, like market integration, are driven by the falling costs of commu-
nications and transportation and the increasing size of business enterprises.
They are also driven by the interaction between the logic of capitalist accu-
mulation and the organisational efforts by people to control and to protect
themselves from market forces.
The formation of a global polity opens the possibility of alternate paths to
hegemony and even of a transformation of the system to include a world
government. Of course, it is also possible, and perhaps, probable, that these
changes are temporary, and that the cycle of hegemonic rivalry and war will
again repeat in devastating fashion. But the possibilities for fundamentally
changing the system are greater now than in the previous century.
Boswell and Chase-Dunn immediately confront potential criticism that the
dominant institutions today will be terribly difficult to influence:
While the idea of a world state may be a frightening specter to some, we are
optimistic about it for several reasons. First a world state is probably the
most direct and stable way to prevent world war, which must be at the top
of everyone’s list. Secondly, the creation of a global state that can peacefully
adjudicate disputes among nations will transform the existing interstate
system. The interstate system is the political structure that stands behind the
maneuverability of capital and its ability to escape organized workers and
other social constraints on profitable accumulation. While a world state may
at first be largely controlled by capitalists, the very existence of such a state
will provide a single focus for struggles to socially regulate investment deci-
sions and to create a more balanced, egalitarian, and ecologically sound form
of production and distribution.
The importance of this argument for many of us in the developing world is
that the semi-industrialised ‘semi-periphery’ (which in Africa includes
Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, and possibly Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Botswana, Ghana and Mauritius) is the site from which campaigns to
radicalise governance of the world state would come. For Boswell and
Chase-Dunn, ‘Semiperipheral locations are especially conducive to institu-
tional innovations that have the potential to transform systemic logic. The
most powerful movements toward the creation of a socialist mode of
accumulation have emerged in the modern semiperiphery.’
The UN and global regulation?

In a similar spirit, but with a more nuanced approach, political philosopher
Iris Marion Young recommends closure of the IMF and World Bank
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 209
(which ‘do not even pretend to be inclusive and democratic’) so as to

pursue a ‘reasonable goal’: reform of the United Nations, ‘the best existing
starting point for building global democratic institutions … As members of
the General Assembly, nearly all the world’s peoples today are represented
at the UN.’ Moreover, the UN is a site where imperial powers ‘seek legiti-
macy for some of their international actions’ and where states ‘at least
appear to be cooperative and interested in justice’. Likewise, civil society
organisations have mobilised around UN events and issues.29
The primary problem here is that given the existing and foreseeable
balance of international power, hopes for eco-social progress through
world-state building are utopian (maybe dangerously so). Far more likely if
this course is pursued is an expansion of neo-liberalism, the universal rule
of property and the commodification of all aspects of daily life everywhere,
with the consequent destruction of non-capitalist eco-socio-economic
processes, amplified through far more devastating punishments meted out
in the ‘international community’ when oppositional states or popular
movements transgress the rules.
Fix it or nix it?

If running part of a world state remains out of the question, Left strategists
are faced with the crude choice captured in the slogan ‘Fix it or nix it’. (A
more complex ‘Fix it or [else we’ll] nix it’ lay in between, and when
adopted in mid-2000, allowed Public Citizen and the AFL-CIO an oppor-
tunity to work fruitlessly for a year on WTO reform before perhaps then
advocating abolition, and more recently a left-leaning ‘shrink or sink’ line
to accommodate Public Citizen’s newly radicalised constituents.) Fixers
argue that the IMF and World Bank were pressured to adopt reforms over
the past 15 or so years. Nixers rebut this by saying that these reforms must
be measured against the worsening scale of eco-socio-economic damage
over the same period of crisis displacement.
Indeed, thanks to the combination of deeply unsatisfying reforms won to
date, the sour-grapes Stiglitz departure and the Interaction letter distancing
co-opted NGOs from the A16/17 protests, organisers in the Mobilization
for Global Justice could seek and achieve a rare clarity of radical strategic
purpose.
Likewise, one of the leading Third World advocates of radical inter-
national economics, Walden Bello, director of Focus on the Global
South in Bangkok, made a crucial intervention in early 2000 in favour of
abolition:
Seventy per cent of the Bank’s non-aid lending is concentrated in 11 coun-
tries, while the Bank’s 145 other member countries are left to divide the
remaining 30 per cent. Moreover, 80 per cent of World Bank resources have
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 210
gone, not to poor countries with poor credit ratings and investment ratings,
but to countries that could have raised the money in international private
capital markets owing to their having investment grade or high yield ratings.
In terms of achieving a positive development impact, the Bank’s own
evaluation of its projects shows an outstanding 55–60 per cent failure rate.
The failure rate is particularly high in the poorest countries, where it ranges
from 65 per cent to 70 per cent. And these are the very countries that are
supposed to be the main targets of the Bank’s anti-poverty approach …
Rather than expect the highly paid World Bank technocrats who live in
the affluent suburbs of Northern Virginia to do the impossible – designing
anti-poverty programs for folks from another planet: poor people in the
Sahel – it would be more effective to abolish an institution that has made a
big business out of ‘ending poverty,’ and completely devolve the work to
local, national and regional institutions better equipped to attack the causes
of poverty.30
5. After the IMF/World Bank have gone:

Local/national/regional development finance?
Marx once asserted that prior to constructing world socialism, each work-
ing class must first deal with its own national bourgeoisie, a position that
still incorporated a fairly advanced critique of early colonial globalisation.
Global deconstruction and national reconstruction may be a useful formula
with which to begin a conclusion to the struggle. For implicit in the argu-
ment sketched out above is that the nation state requires relief from the
pressures of global financial capitalism, especially those pressures repre-
sented by IMF/World Bank missions that so decisively squeeze and shift
power relations at the domestic level.
And there is no shortage of class and political struggles on the national
level. During the late 1990s, mass strikes by national workers’ movements
shook Nigeria, Indonesia, Paraguay and Taiwan (1994); Bolivia, Canada
and France (1995); Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Greece, Italy, South Korea,
Spain and Venezuela (1996); Belgium, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti and South
Korea (1997); and many other important sites of East Asian, East
European, African and Latin American proletarian suffering when neo-
liberal economic disaster intensified in 1998–9.
A political warning is clearly in order, from David Harvey: ‘Withdrawing
to the nation-state as the exclusive strategic site of class organisation and
struggle is to court failure (as well as to flirt with nationalism and all that
that entails). This does not mean the nation-state has become irrelevant –
indeed it has become more relevant than ever. But the choice of spatial scale
is not “either/or” but “both/and” even though the latter entails confronting
serious contradictions’.31
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 211
Yet identifying and confronting such contradictions can probably best be

advanced by building international solidarity to delegitimise, defund and
decommission the IMF and World Bank – which will, in the process, raise
questions about the politics of scale associated with a more liberatory form
of development finance than could ever conceivably be on offer from these
two institutions. To consider this argument even briefly entails a review of
the experience of post-apartheid South Africa. Three universal reasons
have emerged in South Africa for nixing the IMF/World Bank (other
reasons drawn from specific project and policy experiences were consid-
ered in Chapter 3):
Virtually all possible core-value reforms in key areas of IMF/World
Bank eco-socio-economic advocacy have been explored, and their
profound limitations unveiled.
There is a greater urgency to restore nation-state sovereignty (and hence
mere bourgeois democracy, which has also ebbed), mainly through
lifting IMF/World Bank pressure, than there is time to convince several
tens of thousands of hardened Washington economists to reverse the
policy advice that has defined their world view since grad. school.
The hard-currency component of IMF and World Bank lending should
not be required once appropriate conditions are achieved.
This latter argument deserves justification, for, if local, national and

regional development finance is appropriate, then the technical (not
political, moral or environmental) reasons to have an IMF and World Bank
evaporate. Such was the viewpoint of the African National Congress in its
Reconstruction and Development Programme of 1994, in a principle won
only after much left-wing lobbying: ‘The RDP must use foreign debt
financing only for those elements of the programme that can potentially
increase our capacity for earning foreign exchange.’32 (The ANC broke
many such promises, but the principle here is worth careful reflection.)
The motivation for rejecting hard-currency loans for ‘development’ was
the ANC left’s fear of the rising cost of repayment on foreign debt, once the
currency declines, and the use of hard currency to pay not for initiating a
basic education project but instead for repaying illegitimate apartheid debt,
importing luxury goods for the rich and replacing local workers with in-
appropriate job-destroying, dependency-inducing technology from abroad.
In sum, why take a US-dollar loan for building and staffing a small rural
school that has virtually no foreign input costs?
If real development comes from local resources, since only a tiny fraction
of basic-need inputs in most developing countries require foreign loans, and
if the hard currency needed to import petroleum or other vital inputs can
usually be readily supplied by export credit agencies (competing against
each other, in contrast to centralised financial power and co-ordination in
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 212
Washington), the basic rationales for the World Bank fall away. And instead
of relying upon the IMF to maintain a positive balance of payments when
fickle international financial inflows dry up or run away frightened, Third
World countries that in the future climb out from under the heel of the IMF
and World Bank could realistically impose Malaysian-style exchange
controls and tax unnecessary imports. (They would also have more freedom
to default on illegitimate debt.)
In short, the South ultimately shouldn’t need a dollar-denominated IMF
and World Bank for development. Indeed it is probable that only when
Washington’s institutional power fades that local-, national- and perhaps
regional-development finance officials can reacquire the ability they once
enjoyed, a few decades ago, to tame their own financial markets. (Such
‘financial repression’ entailed state interest-rate subsidies, directed credit,
prescribed asset requirements on institutional investors, community re-
investment mandates and other means of socialising financial capital.)
The one remaining point to make is the easiest, most practical concern:
is defunding actually feasible? The same question was asked of advocates of
anti-apartheid financial sanctions, and answered in the affirmative in 1985,
just a few years after campaigning became serious. In addition to defunding
the IMF through popular pressure on Congress – and indeed all parlia-
ments – to deny further resources, activists returning from A16 began
taking advantage of the World Bank’s extreme reliance upon international
bond markets. Nearly 80% of its funds for onlending come from bonds,
making this the most compelling pressure point and local handle for the
medium-term struggle. Hence, the World Bank Bonds Boycott was initiated
by Haitian, South African, Brazilian and many other activists and debt
campaigners across the world in late 1999, and launched in April 2000.33
Berkeley City Council offered the initial commitment that its municipal
fund managers won’t buy World Bank bonds (they were also the first
municipality to record anti-apartheid divestment). All investors of
conscience – pension funds, churches, university endowments, individuals
– are being asked not to profit from poverty and ecological destruction
through increasing the World Bank bond holdings of their portfolios. In
particular, the Rainforest Action Network combined with the World Bank
Bonds Boycott campaign to target Citibank for its marketing of World
Bank Bonds. A frightened Washington Post lead editorial called the World
Bank Bonds Boycott ‘crazy’.34 In coming months and years, activists will
prove establishment concerns entirely justified, as they did using the finan-
cial sanctions that demonstrably helped sink the Botha and De Klerk
regimes in Pretoria.
For progressive internationalists, breaking the Bank and defunding the
Fund can dramatically improve global and local power balances, open up
radical development-finance alternatives, and contribute to a solidarity
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 213
unfettered by controversy over reform of imperialist institutions. A16 gave

thousands of activists an initial opportunity to make the Bank and Fund
run. The followup challenge is to keep the institutions running, until they
drop of exhaustion.
But this has to happen globally and locally. Is there similar sentiment and
activism under way in the Third World?
Notes
1 St Clair, J. (1999), ‘Seattle Diary: It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas’, New Left Review; see also
Charlton, J. (2000), ‘Talking Seattle’, International Socialism, 86.
2 Core groups included 50 Years is Enough, Alliance for Global Justice, Jobs with
Justice, Essential Information, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Center for
Economic Justice and several others. From their bases outside Washington, Global
Exchange continued its leading ideological role, Ruckus Society did excellent train-
ing, the Rainforest Action Network helped with direct action, and the International
Forum on Globalization sponsored a well-attended teach-in.
3 Albert, M. (2000), ‘Assessing A16’, Z Magazine, 19 April.
4 The most eloquent critique of these tendencies is to be found in Hart-Landsberg, M.
and Burkett, P. (2000), Development, Crisis and Class Struggle: Learning from Japan
and East Asia, New York, St. Martin’s Press.
5 The main published account to date, focusing on West Coast movement infrastruc-
ture, is by Dan LaBotz in Against the Current, September 2000.
6 The lead up to the current moment of anti-corporate protest is brilliantly analysed
by Klein, N. (2000), No Logo, London, Flamingo.
7 A recent discussion of the necessary tension between party and mass grassroots
organisation is Kagarlitsky, B. (2000), The Return of Radicalism: Reshaping the Left
Institutions, London, Pluto Press.
8 Economist, 11–17 December 1999.
9 http://www.aidc.org.za and http://www.jubileesouth.net/.
10 Kagarlitsky, B. (2000), ‘Prague: The People’s Battle’, unpublished manuscript,
October.
11 Among the 22 thriving charities and agencies were the National Peace Corps
Association, Overseas Development Council, Pathfinder International, Refugees
International, Save the Children and World Vision.
12 Clark, J. (2000), ‘Not all NGOs hate the Bank: memo to Katherine Marshall,’ World
Bank e-mail, 18 April.
13 Business Week, 24 April 2000; Program on International Policy Attitudes (2000),
Americans on Globalization: A Study of US Public Attitudes, College Park, Maryland,
p. 13.
14 One leading South advocacy group, Third World Network of Penang, Malaysia,
offered powerful opposition to Social Clauses from the outset, and their Africa affil-
iate, Isodec, Ghana’s premier NGO, co-ordinated an Africa Trade Network which
included the main left-wing organisations across the continent. See, for example,
Danaher, K. and Burbach, R. (eds) (2000), Globalize This!: The Battle Against the
World Trade Organization and Corporate Rule, Monroe, Common Courage Press,
especially the chapter by Walden Bello, ‘Why Reforming the WTO is the Wrong
Agenda’.
15 The quotations from Mitchell and Cockburn both appear in The Nation, 3 January
2000. Cockburn continued, ‘We should be making war on the IMF and World Bank,
helping poor countries fight to develop internal markets, hence better-paid workers
Chapter 10 7/22/03 6:30 pm Page 214
and stronger agriculture. We have plenty to denounce right here. The Jubilee 2000
campaign against World Bank bonds is a great thing.’
16 Bond, P. (2000), ‘Workers of the World, Transcend the Wedge!’, Z-Net
Commentary, 24 February; for more on the Social Clause debate, see
http://www.aidc.org.za.
17 See, for example, the writings of William Greider in The Nation.
18 It was Rosemary Nyerere Mwamakula who made this statement to the press in
Johannesburg, in honour of her late father’s unheeded call in 1983 for a debtor’s
cartel.
19 The Economist, 7 February 1992.
20 Daly, H. (1996), Beyond Growth, Boston, Beacon Press.
21 Wade, R. (2000), The Gift of Capital, London, Verso.
22 Stiglitz, J. (1998), ‘More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward a Post-
Washington Consensus’, WIDER Annual Lecture, Helsinki, 7 January. The limits
are addressed in Fine, B. (1998), ‘Industrial Policy Revisited’, Indicator SA, 15(4).
23 Stiglitz, J. (2000), ‘What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis’, New Republic,
17 April.
24 Selvaggio, K. and Deng, D. (2000), ‘Impressions of WB/IMF PRSP Training’,
e-mail, Catholic Relief Services, 11 May.
25 Transcript of 12 April 2000 press conference held by James Wolfensohn,
Washington, DC.
26 http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue364/item9048.asp.
27 Wagar, W. (1992), A Short History of the Future, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press. See reactions in Journal of World Systems Research, 2, 1996 (including Bond,
P. and Mayekiso, M., ‘Towards the Integration of Urban Social Movements at the
World Scale’).
28 Boswell, T. and Chase-Dunn, C. (2000), The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism,
Boulder, Lynn Reiner. Both the quotations that follow are taken from the
Conclusion.
29 Young, I. M. (2000), Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
pp. 272–4. Young grounds the UN argument in the work of Erskine Childers, Brian
Urquhart and Chadwick Alger, and in David Held’s theory of cosmopolitan democ-
racy.
30 Bello, W. (2000), ‘Meltzer Report on Bretton Woods Twins Builds Case for
Abolition but Hesitates’, Focus on Trade, 48, April.
31 African National Congress (1994), Reconstruction and Development Programme,
Johannesburg, Umanyano Publications, sec. 6.5.16. See the discussion in Chapter
three, above.
32 Harvey, D. (1998), ‘The Geography of Class Power’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys, The
Communist Manifesto Now: Socialist Register 1998, New York, Monthly Review
Press, p. 72. Similar points have been made to me in very useful personal corre-
spondence with Ellen Wood, Susan George and Jeremy Brecher, amongst others.
Wood may be correct that ‘the opposite of fix-it may be something else – not nix-it,
but getting behind various kinds of local and national anti-capitalist and anti-impe-
rialist struggles, which isn’t quite the same thing’.
33 http://www.worldbankboycott.org/.
34 Washington Post, 11 April 2000.
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Against Global Apartheid: 2nd edition

© UCT Press, 2001, 2003

Second edition 2003

ISBN 1 919 71382 4 UCT Press, limp

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Copy editing by Alex Potter of FPP Productions

Part one: Powers and vulnerabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter two: Southern African socio-economic conflict . . . . . . . . . . 31

Chapter three: Bretton Woods bankruptcies in Southern Africa . . . . 54

Chapter four: Foreign aid, development and underdevelopment . . . . 80

iv A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

Part two: Elite contestation of global governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Chapter six: Ideology and global governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

Chapter seven: Pretoria’s global governance strategy . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Chapter nine: Civil society conquest, state failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Part four: Globalisation? – or internationalism plus the nation state? 191

Chapter twelve: The case for locking capital down . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

[Southern African countries] were pressured into implementing [IMF and

Introduction: International financial pressure points

viii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

In the hands of international capital

x A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

To break – or to shine – the chains of global apartheid?

Nixing not fixing global apartheid: A South African

xii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

Bonds Boycott’ campaign by students, staff and faculty. The short-run

Subsequently, neo-apartheid lending and policy advice by the Bretton

World Bank promotion of ‘market-oriented’ land reform in 1993–94,

xiv A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

First, refer to endnote 2 of Chapter three for a list of extraordinary Southern

xviii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

Johannesburg; the University of California/Los Angeles Center for Social Theory

xx A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

xxii A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

In addition, a variety of popular publications have carried shorter versions of the

ALF-CIO American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial

xxiv A GAINST GLOBAL APARTHEID

NIEP National Institute of Economic Policy

Top: Anti-apartheid poet Dennis Brutus, Prague, September 2000.

Powers and vulnerabilities

Neville Gabriel of Jubilee, South Africa, debates Bretton Woods officials

Top: Davie Malungisa of the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development

Global crisis, African oppression

4 P OWERS AND VULNERABILITIES

1) falling profits combined with systematic overproduction;

2. Global crisis, and crisis displacement

G LOBAL CRISIS , A FRICAN OPPRESSION 5

Reagan’s devastating attacks on US trade unions and the social wage,

A brief theory of crisis

6 P OWERS AND VULNERABILITIES

especially traditional manufacturing. This is typically caused by gluts of

G LOBAL CRISIS , A FRICAN OPPRESSION 7

Stalling and shifting the crisis

8 P OWERS AND VULNERABILITIES

returns on specific overaccumulated capital cannot, ultimately, be realised.

G LOBAL CRISIS , A FRICAN OPPRESSION 9